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THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW 


AND OTHER TALES 


BY 

RUDYARD RIFLING 

AUTHOR OF “THE LIGHT THAT FAILED,” “ PLAiA TALES FROM TH& 
HILLS,” “SOLDIERS THREE,” ETC., ETC. 



NEW YORK 

HURST AND COMPANY 


publishers; 










CONTENTS. 


The Phantom ’Rickshaw, . . * 

My Own True Ghost Story, * * 

The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes 
The Man Who Would Be King, . 


» 






l 






PREFACE. 


This is not exactly a book of downright ghost- 
stories as the cover makes believe. It is rather a 
collection of facts that never quite explained them- 
selves. All that the collector is certain of is, that 
one man insisted upon dying because he believed 
himself to be haunted; another man either made up 
a wonderful lie and stuck to it, or visited a very 
strange place; while the third man was indubitably 
crucified by some person or persons unknown, and 
gave an extraordinary account of himself. 

The peculiarity of ghost-stories is that they are 
never told first-hand. I have managed, with infi- 
nite trouble, to secure one exception to this rule. 
It is not a very good specimen, but you can credit 
it from beginning to end. The other three stories 
you must take on trust ; as I did. 

Rudyard Kipling. 
















% 







(THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. 


May no ill dreams disturb my rest, 

Nor Powers of Darkness me molest. 

— Evening Hymn . 

One of the few advantages that India has over 
England is a great Knowability. After five years’ 
service a man is directly or indirectly acquainted 
with the two or three hundred Civilians in his 
Province, all the Messes of ten or twelve Regi- 
ments and Batteries, and some fifteen hundred 
other people of the non-official caste. In ten years 
his knowledge should be doubled, and at the end of 
twenty he knows, or knows something about, every 
Englishman in the Empire, and may travel any- 
where and everywhere without paying hotel-bills. 

Globe-trotters who expect entertainment as a 
right have, even within my memory, blunted this 
open-heartedness, but none the less to-day, if you 
belong to the Inner Circle and are neither a Bear 
nor a Black Sheep, all houses are open to you, and 
our small world is very, very kind and helpful. 

Rickett of Kamartha stayed with Polder of Ku- 
maon some fifteen years ago. He meant to stay 
two nights, but was knocked down by rheumatic 
fey errand for six weeks disorganized Polder’s estab- 


7 


8 THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. 

Jishment, stopped Polder's work, and nearly died 
in Polder’s bedroom. Polder behaves as though 
he had been placed under eternal obligation by 
Rickett, and yearly sends the little Ricketts a box 
of presents and toys. It is the same everywhere. 
The men who do not take the trouble to conceal 
from you their opinion that you are an incom- 
petent ass, and the women who blacken your char- 
acter and misunderstand your wife’s amusements, 
will work themselves to the bone in your behalf if 
you fall sick or into serious trouble. 

Heatherlegh, the Doctor, kept, in addition to his 
regular practice, a hospital on his private account 
—an arrangement of loose boxes for Incurables, his 
friends called it — but it was really a sort of fitting- 
up shed for craft that had been damaged by stress of 
weather. The weather in India is often sultry, and 
since the tale of bricks is always a fixed quantity, 
and the only liberty allowed is permission to work 
overtime and get no thanks, men occasionally 
break down and become as mixed as the metaphors 
in this sentence. 

Heatherlegh is the dearest doctor that ever was, 
and his invariable prescription to all his patients is, 
" lie low, go slow, and keep cool.” He says that 
more men are killed by overwork than the impor- 
tance of this world justifies. He maintains that 
overwork slew Pansay, who died under his hands 
about three years ago. He has, of course, the 
fight to speak authoritatively, and he laughs at my 
theory that there was a crack in Pansay’s head and 


THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. 0 

a little bit of the Dark World came through and 
pressed him to death. “ Pansay went off the 
handle,” says Heatherlegh, “ after the stimulus of 
long leave at Home. He may or he may not have 
behaved like a blackguard to Mrs. Keith- Wessing- 
ton. My notion is that the work of the Katabundi 
Settlement ran him off his legs, and that he took to 
brooding and making much of an ordinary P. & O. 
flirtation. He certainly was engaged to Miss 
Mannering, and she certainly broke off the engage- 
ment. Then he took a feverish chill and all that 
nonsense about ghosts developed. Overwork 
started his illness, kept it alight, and killed him, 
poor devil. Write him off to the System — one 
man to take the work of two and a half men.” 

I do not believe this. I used to sit up with Pan- 
say sometimes when Heatherlegh was called out to 
patients, and I happened to be within claim. The 
man would make me most unhappy by describing 
in a low, even voice, the procession that was always 
passing at the bottom of his bed. He had a sick 
man’s command of language. When he recovered 
I suggested that he should write out the whole 
affair from beginning to end, knowing that ink 
might assist him to ease his mind. When little 
boys have learned a new bad word they are never 
happy till they have chalked it up on a door. And 
this also is Literature. 

He was in a high fever while he was writing, 
and the blood-and-thunder Magazine diction he 
adopted did not calm him. Two months afterward 


to the phantom ^rickshaw. 

ke was reported fit for duty, but, in spite of the fact 
that he was urgently needed to help an under- 
manned Commission stagger through a deficit, he 
preferred to die; vowing at the last that he was 
hag-ridden. I got his manuscript before he died, 
and this is his version of the affair, dated 1885: 

1 My doctor tells me that I need rest and change 
of air. It is not improbable that I shall get both 
ere long — rest that neither the red-coated messen- 
ger nor the mid-day gun can break, and change of 
air far beyond that which any homeward-bound 
steamer can give me. In the meantime I am re> 
solved to stay where I am; and, in flat defiance otf 
my doctor's orders, to take all the world into my 
confidence. You shall learn for yourselves the* 
precise nature of my malady; and shall, too, judge 
for yourselves whether any man born of woman on 
this weary earth was ever so tormented as I. 

Speaking now as a condemned criminal might 
speak ere the drop-bolts are drawn, my story, wild 
and hideously improbable as it may appear, de- 
mands at least attention. That it will ever receive) 
credence I utterly disbelieve. Two months ago l 
should have scouted as mad or drunk the man who 
had dared tell me the like. Two months ago I was 
the happiest man in India. To-day, from Pesha-* 
war to the sea, there is no one more wretched. 
My doctor and I are the only two who know this. 
His explanation is, that my brain, digestion, and 
eyesight are all slightly affected; giving rise to my 


THE PHANTOM J RICKSHAW. It 

frequent and persistent “ delusions.” Delusions, 
indeed! I call him a fool; but he attends me still 
with the same unwearied smile, the same bland pro- 
fessional manner, the same neatly trimmed red 
whiskers, till I begin to suspect that I am an un- 
grateful, evil-tempered invalid. But you shall 
judge for yourselves. 

Three years ago it was my fortune — my great 
misfortune — to sail from Gravesend to Bombay, on 
return from long leave, with one Agnes Keith- 
Wessington, wife of an officer on the Bombay side. 
It does not in the least concern you to know what 
manner of woman she was. Be content with the 
knowledge that, ere the voyage had ended, both 
she and I were desperately and unreasoningly in 
love with one another. Heaven knows that I can 
make the admission now without one particle of 
vanity. In matters of this sort there is always one 
who gives and another who accepts. From the 
first day of our ill-omened attachment, I was con- 
scious that Agnes’ passion was a stronger, a more 
dominant, and — if I may use the expression — a 
purer sentiment than mine. Whether she recog- 
nized the fact then, I do not know. Afterward it 
was bitterly plain to both of us. 

Arrived at Bombay in the spring of the year, we 
went our respective ways, to meet no more for the 
next three or four months, when my leave and her 
love took us both to Simla. There we spent the 
season together; and there my fire of straw burnt 
itself out to a pitiful end with the closing year. I 


i 2 THE FHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. 

attempt no excuse. I make no apology. Mrs. 
Wessington had given up much for my sake, and 
was prepared to give up all. From my own lips in 
August, 1882, she learnt that I was sick of her pres- 
ence, tired of her company, and weary of the sound 
of her voice. Ninety-nine women out of a hun- 
dred would have wearied of me as I wearied of 
them; seventy-five of that number would have 
promptly avenged themselves by active and obtru- 
sive flirtation with other men. Mrs. Wessington 
was the hundredth. On her neither my openly ex- 
pressed aversion nor the cutting brutalities with 
which I garnished our interviews had the least 
effect. 

“Jack, darling!” was her one eternal cuckoo 
cry: “ I’m sure it’s all a mistake — a hideous mis* 
take; and we’ll be good friends agam some day. 
Please forgive me, Jack, dear.” 

I was the offender, and I knew it. That knowl- 
edge transformed my pity into passive endurance, 
and, eventually, into blind hate — the same instinct, 
I suppose, which prompts a man to savagely stamp 
on the spider he has but half killed. And with this 
hate in my bosom the seascn of 1882 came to an 
end. 

Next year we met again at Simla — she with hef 
monotonous face and timid attempts at reconcilia- 
tion, and I with loathing of her in every fiber of my 
frame. Several times I could not avoid meeting 
her alone; and on each occasion her words wvre 
identically rhe same. Still the unreasoning wail 


THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. (j 

that it was all a " mistake ; ” and still the Hope ol 
eventually “ making friends/’ I might have seen, 
had I cared to look, that that hope only was keep- 
ing her alive. She grew more wan and thin month 
by month. You will agree with me, at least, that 
such conduct would have driven anyone to despair. 
It was uncalled for; childish; unwomanly. I main-j 
tain that she was much to blame. And again; 
sometimes, in the black, fever-stricken night- 
watches, I have begun to think that I might have 
been a little kinder to her. But that really is a 
“ delusion.” I could not have continued pretend- 
ing to love her when I didn’t; could I? It would 
have been unfair to us both. 

Last year we met again — on the same terms as 
before. The same weary appeals, and the same curt 
answers from my lips. At least I would make her 
see how wholly wrong and hopeless were her at- 
tempts at resuming the old relationship. As the 
season wore on, we fell apart — that is to say, she 
found it difficult to meet me, for I had other and 
more absorbing interests to attend to. When I 
think it over quietly in my sickroom, the season of 
1884 seems a confused nightmare wherein light 
and shade were fantastically intermingled — my 
courtship of little Kitty Mannering; my hopes, 
doubts, and fears; our long rides together; my 
trembling avowal of attachment; her reply; and 
now and again a vision of a white face flitting by in 
the ’rickshaw with the black and white liveries I 
once watched for so earnestly; the wave of Mrs. 


14 


THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. 


Wessington’s gloved hand; and, when she met me 
alone, which was but seldom, the irksome mo- 
notony of her appeal. I loved Kitty Mannering; 
honestly, heartily loved her, and with my love for 
her grew my hatred for Agnes. In August Kitty 
and I were engaged. The next day I met those 
accursed “ magpie ” jhampanies at the back of 
Jakko, and, moved by some passing sentiment of 
pity, stopped to tell Mrs. Wessington everything. 
She knew it already. 

“ So I hear you’re engaged, Jack, dear.” Then, 
without a moment’s pause: “ I’m sure it’s all a mis- 
take — a hideous mistake. We shall be as good 
friends some day, Jack, as we ever were.” 

My answer might have made even a man wince. 
It cut the dying woman before me like the blow of 
a whip. “ Please forgive me, Jack; I didn’t mean 
to make you angry; but it’s true, it’s true! ” 

And Mrs. Wessington broke down completely. 
I turned away and left her to finish her journey in 
peace, feeling, but only for a moment or two, that 
I had been an unutterably mean hound. I looked 
back, and saw that she had turned her ’rickshaw 
with the idea, I suppose, of overtaking me. 

The scene and its surroundings were photo- 
graphed on my memory. The rain-swept sky (we 
were at the end of the wet weather), the sodden, 
dingy pines, the muddy road, and the black 
powder-riven cliffs formed a gloomy background 
against which the black and white liveries of the 
jhampanies, the yellow-paneled ’rickshaw and Mrs. 


THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. 15 

iWessmgfon’s down-bowed golden head stood out 
clearly. She was holding her handkerchief in her 
left hand and was leaning back exhausted against 
the ’rickshaw cushions. I turned my horse up a 
bypath near the Sanjowlie Reservoir and literally 
ran away. Once I fancied I heard a faint call of 
“Jack!” This may have been imagination. I 
never stopped to verify it. Ten minutes later I 
came across Kitty on horseback; and, in the de- 
light of a long ride with her, forgot all about the 
interview. 

A week later Mrs. Wessington died, and the in- 
expressible burden of her existence was removed 
from my life. I went Plainsward perfectly happy. 
Before three months were over I had forgotten all 
about her, except that at times the discovery of 
some of her old letters reminded me unpleasantly 
of our bygone relationship. By January I had dis- 
interred what was left of our correspondence from 
among my scattered belongings and had burnt it. 
At the beginning of April of this year, 1885, I was 
at Simla — semi-deserted Simla — once more, and 
was deep in lover’s talks and walks with Kitty. It 
was decided that we should be married at the ead 
of June. You will understand, therefore, that 
loving Kitty as I did, I am not saying too much 
when I pronounce myself to have been, at that 
time, the happiest man in India. 

Fourteen delightful days passed almost before I 
noticed their flight. Then, aroused to the sense of 
what was proper among mortals circumstanced as 


jg THE phantom 'rickshaw. 

we were, I pointed out to Kitty that an engage* 
tnent ring was the outward and visible sign o ler 
dignity as an engaged girl; and that she must forth- 
with come to Hamilton’s to be measured for one. 
Up to that moment, I give you my word, we had 
completely forgotten so trivial a matter 1 o 
Hamilton’s we accordingly went on the 15th ot 
April, 1885. Remember that — whatever my doc- 
tor may say to the contrary— I was then in perfect 
health enjoying a well-balanced mind and an 
absolutely 1 tranquil spirit. Kitty and I entered 
Hamilton’s shop together, and there, regardlesg of, 
the order of affairs, I measured Kitty for the ring 
in the presence of the amused assistant The ring 
was a sapphire with two diamonds. We then rode 
out down the slope that leads to the Comberme e 

Bridge and Peliti’s shop. 

While my Waler was cautiously feeling his way 
over the loose shale, and Kitty was laughing and 
chattering at my side— while all Simla > J^at is 
say as much of it as had then come from the Plains 
was grouped round the Reading-room and Pehti s 
veranda,— I was aware that someone, apparently at 
a vast distance, was calling me by my Christian 
name. It struck me that I had heard the voice be- 
fore, but when and where I could not at once deter- 
mine. In the short space it took to cover the road 
between the path from Hamilton s shop and t 
first plank of the Combermere Bridge I had 
thought over half a dozen people who might have 
committed such a solecism, and had eventually 


THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW, 


17 


tided that it must have been some singing- in my 
ears. Immediately opposite Peliti’s shop my eye 
was arrested by the sight of four jhampanies in 
“ magpie ” livery, pulling a yellow-paneled, cheap, 
bazaar ’rickshaw. In a moment my mind flew 
back to the previous season and Mrs. Wessington 
with a sense of irritation and disgust. Was it not 
enough that the woman was dead and done with, 
without her black and white servitors reappearing 
to spoil the day’s happiness? Whoever employed 
them now I thought I would call upon, and ask as 
a personal favor to change her jhampanies’ livery. 

I would hire the men myself, and, if necessary, buy 
their coats from off their backs. It is impossible 
to say here what a flood of undesirable memories ' 
their presence evoked. 

“ Kitty,” I cried, “ there are poor Mrs. Wessing- 
ton’s jhampanies turned up again! I wonder who 
has them now? ” 

Kitty had known Mrs. Wessington slightly last 
season, and had always been interested in the sickly 
woman. 

“ What? Where? ” she asked. “ I can’t see 
them anywhere.” 

Even as she spoke, her horse, swerving from a 
laden mule, threw himself directly in front of the 
advancing ’rickshaw. I had scarcely time to utter 
a word of warning when, to my unutterable horror, 
horse and rider passed through men and carriage 
as if they had been thin air. 

“ What’s the matter? ” cried Kitty; “ what made 




l8 THfe, PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. 

you call out so foolishly, Jack? If I am engaged I 
don’t want all creation to know about it. There 
was lots of space between the mule and the 
veranda; and, if you think I can’t ride — there! ” 

Whereupon willful Kitty set off, her dainty little 
head in the air, at a hand-gallop in the direction of 
the Band-stand; fully expecting, as she herself 
afterward told me, that I should follow her. What 
was the matter? Nothing indeed. Either that I 
was mad or drunk, or that Simla was haunted with 
devils. I reined in my impatient cob, and turned 
round. The ’rickshaw had turned too, and now 
stood immediately facing me, near the left railing 
of the Combermere Bridge. 

“ Jack! Jack, darling! ” (There was no mistake 
about the words this time: they rang through my 
brain as if they had been shouted in my ear.) “ It’s 
some hideous mistake, I’m sure. Please forgive 
me, Jack, and let’s be friends again.” 

The ’rickshaw-hood had fallen back, and inside, 
as I hope and pray daily for the death I dread by 
night, sat Mrs. Keith- Wessingt on, handkerchief in 
hand, and golden head bowed on her breast. 

How long I stared motionless I do not know. 
-Finally, I was aroused by my syce taking the 
Waler’s bridle and asking whether I was ill. From 
the horrible to the commonplace is but a step. I 
tumbled off my horse and dashed, half fainting, 
into Peliti’s for a glass of cherry-brandy. There 
two or three couples were gathered round the 


THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. 


*9 


coffee-tables discussing the gossip of the day. 
Their trivialities were more comforting to me just 
then than the consolations of religion could have 
been. I plunged into the midst of the conversa- 
tion at once; chatted, laughed, and jested with a 
face (when I caught a glimpse of it in a mirror) as 
white and drawn as that of a corpse. Three or 
four men noticed my condition; and, evidently set- 
ting it down to the results of over-many pegs, 
charitably endeavored to draw me apart from the 
rest of the loungers. But I refused to be led away. 
I wanted the company of my kind — as a child 
rushes into the midst of the dinner-party after a 
fright in the dark. I must have talked for about 
ten minutes or so, though it seemed an eternity to 
me, when I heard Kitty’s clear voice outside inquir- 
ing for me. In another minute she had entered 
the shop, prepared to roundly upbraid me for fail- 
ing so signally in my duties. Something in my 
face stopped her. 

“ Why, Jack,” she cried, “ what have you been 
doing? What has happened? Are you ill?” 
Thus driven into a direct lie, I said that the sun had 
been a little too much for me. It was close upon 
five o’clock of a cloudy April afternoon, and the 
sun had been hidden all day. I saw my mistake as 
soon as the words were out of my mouth: at- 
tempted to recover it, blundered hopelessly, and fol- 
lowed Kitty in a regal rage, out of doors, amid the 
smiles of my acquaintances. I made some excuse 


SO THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. 

(I have forgotten what) on the score of my feeling 
faint; and cantered away to my hotel, leaving Kitty 
to finish the ride by herself. 

In my room I sat down and tried calmly to rea- 
son out the matter. Here was I, Theobald Jack 
Pansay, a well-educated Bengal Civilian in the y ear 
of grace 1885, presumably sane, certainly healthy, 
driven in terror from my sweetheart’s side by the 
apparition of a woman who had been dead and 
buried eight months ago. These were facts that I 
could not blink. Nothing was further from my 
thought than any memory of Mrs. Wessington 
when Kitty and I left Hamilton’s shop. Nothing 
was more utterly commonplace than the stretch of 
wall opposite Peliti’s, It was broad daylight. 
The road was full of people; and yet here, look you, 
in defiance of every law of probability, in direct 
outrage of Nature’s ordinance, there had appeared 
to me a face from the grave. 

Kitty’s Arab had gone through the nckshuv: 
so that my first hope that some woman marvel- 
ously like Mrs. Wessington had hired the carriage 
and the coolies with their old livery was lost. 
Again and again I went round this treadmill of 
thought; and again and again gave up, baffled and 
in despair. The voice was as inexplicable as the 
apparition. I had originally some wild notion of 
confiding it all to Kitty; of begging her to marry 
me at once; and in her arms defying the ghostly 
occupant of the ’rickshaw. “ After all,” I argued 
“ the presence of the ’rickshaw is in itself enough 


fliE PHANtOM J RtCKSHAV r it 

to prove the existence of a spectral illusion. One 
may see ghosts of men and women, but surely 
never of coolies and carriages. The whole thing is 
absurd. Fancy the ghost of a hillman! ” 

Next morning I sent a penitent note to Kitty, 
imploring her to overlook my strange conduct of 
the previous afternoon. My Divinity was still 
very wroth, and a personal apology was necessary. 
I explained, with a fluency born of night-long pon- 
dering over a falsehood, that I had been attacked 
with a sudden palpitation of the heart — the result 
of indigestion. This eminently practical solution 
had its effect; and Kitty and I rode out that after- 
noon with the shadow of my first lie dividing us. 

Nothing would please her save a canter round 
Jakko. With my nerves still unstrung from the 
previous night I feebly protested against the no- 
tion, suggesting Observatory Hill, Jutogh, the 
Boileaugunge road — anything rather than the 
Jakko round. Kitty was angry and a little hurt: 
so I yielded from fear of provoking further mis- 
understanding, and we set out together toward 
Chota Simla. We walked a greater part of the 
way, and, according to our custom, cantered from 
a mile or so below the Convent to the stretch of 
level road by the Sanjowlie Reservoir. The 
wretched horses appeared to fly, and my heart beat 
quicker and quicker as we neared the crest of the 
ascent. My mind had been full of Mrs. Wessing- 
ton all the afternoon; and every inch of the Jakko 
road bore witness to our old-time walks and talks. 


24 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW. 

The bowlders were full of it ; the pines sang it aloud 
overhead; the rain-fed torrents giggled and 
chuckled unseen over the shameful story; and the 
wind in my ears chanted the iniquity aloud. 

As a fitting climax, in the middle of the level 
men call the Ladies’ Mile the Horror was awaiting 
me. No other ’rickshaw was in sight — only the 
four black and white jhampanies, the yellow-pan- 
eled carriage, and the golden head of the 
woman within — all apparently just as I had left 
them eight months and one fortnight ago! For 
an instant I fancied that Kitty must see what I 
saw — we were so marvelously sympathetic in all 
things. Her next words undeceived me — “ Not a 
soul in sight! Come along, Jack, and I’ll race you 
to the Reservoir buildings! ” Her wiry little Arab 
was off like a bird, my Waler following close be- 
hind, and in this order we dashed under the cliffs. 
Half a minute brought us within fifty yards of the 
’rickshaw. I pulled my Waler and fell back a little. 
The ’rickshaw was directly in the middle of the 
road; and once more the Arab passed through it, 
my horse following. “ Jack! Jack, dear! Please 
forgive me,” rang with a wail in my ears, and, after 
an interval: — “ It’s all a mistake, a hideous mis- 
take!” 

I spurred my horse like a man possessed. When 
I turned my head at the Reservoir works, the black 
and white liveries were still waiting — patiently 
waiting — under the gray hillside, and the wind 
brought me a mocking echo of the words I had 


tHE PttANTOM 5 RICKStlA#. 


*3 


Just heard. Kitty bantered me a good deal on my 
silence throughout the remainder of the ride. I 
had been talking up till then, wildly and at random. 
To save my life I could not speak afterward natu- 
rally, and from Sanjowlie to the Church wisely held 
my tongue. 

I was to dine with the Mannerings that night, 
'and had barely time to canter home to dress. On 
the road to Elysium Hill I overheard two men 
talking together in the dusk. “ It’s a curious 
thing,” said one, “ how completely all trace of it 
disappeared. You know my wife was insanely 
fond of the woman (’never could see anything in 
her myself), and wanted me to pick up her old 
’rickshaw and coolies if they were to be got for love 
or money. Morbid sort of fancy I call it; but I’ve 
got to do what the Memsahib tells me. Would 
you believe that the man she hired it from tells me 
that all four of the men — they were brothers — died 
of cholera on the way to Hardwar, poor devils; and 
the ’rickshaw has been broken up by the man him- 
self. ’Told me he never used a dead Memsahib's 
’rickshaw. ’Spoilt his luck. Queer notion, wasn’t 
it? Fancy poor little Mrs. Wessington spoiling 
anyone’s luck except her own! ” I laughed aloud, 
at this point; and my laugh jarred on me as I 
uttered it. So there were ghosts of ’rickshaws 
after all, and ghostly employments in the other 
world! How much did Mrs. Wessington give her 
men? What were their hours? Where did they 


«4 


THE P^ANtoM ’RiCKShAW. 


And for visible answer to my last question I saw 
the infernal Thing blocking my path in the twi- 
light. The dead travel fast, and by short cuts un- 
known to ordinary coolies. I laughed aloud a 
second time and checked my laughter suddenly, for 
I was afraid I was going mad. Mad to a certain 
extent I must have been, for I recollect that I 
reined in my horse at the head of the ’rickshaw, 
and politely wished Mrs. Wessington “ Good-even- 
ing.” Her answer was one I knew only too well. 
I listened to the end; and replied that I had heard 
it all before, but should be delighted if she had any- 
thing further to say. Some malignant devil 
stronger than I must have entered into me that 
evening, for I have a dim recollection of talking the 
commonplaces of the day for five minutes to the 
Thing in front of me. 

“ Mad as a hatter, poor devil— or drunk. Max, 
try and get him to come home.” 

Surely that was not Mrs. Wessington’s voice! 
The two men had overheard me speaking to the 
empty air, and had returned to look after me. 
They were very kind and considerate, and from 
their words evidently gathered that I was ex- 
tremely drunk. I thanked them confusedly and 
cantered away to my hotel, there changed, and 
arrived at the Mannerings’ ten minutes late. I 
pleaded the darkness of the night as_an excuse; was 
rebuked by Kitty for my unlover-like tardiness; 
and sat down. 

The conversation had already become general; 


‘Jttfc PHANtdM ‘RICKSHAW. i| 

and under cover of it, I was addressing some ten- 
der small talk to my sweetheart when I was aware 
that at the further end of the table a short red- 
whiskered man was describing, with much broidery, 
his encounter with a mad unknown that evening. 

A few sentences convinced me that he was re- 
peating the incident of half an hour ago. In the 
middle of the story he looked round for applause, 
as professional story-tellers do, caught my eye, and 
straightway collapsed. There was a moment’s 
awkward silence, and the red-whiskered man mut- 
tered something to the effect that he had “ forgot- 
ten the rest,” thereby sacrificing a reputation as a 
good story-teller which he had built up for six sea- 
sons past. I blessed him from the bottom of my 
heart, and — went on with my fish. 

In the fullness of time that dinner came to an 
end; and with genuine regret I tore myself away 
from Kitty — as certain as I was of my own exist- 
ence that It would be waiting for me outside the 
door. The red-whiskered man, who had been 
introduced to me as Dr. Heatherlegh of Simla, 
volunteered to bear me company as far as our roads 
lay together. I accepted his offer with gratitude. 

My instinct had not deceived me. It lay in 
readiness in the Mall, and, in what seemed devilish 
mockery of our ways, with a lighted head-lamp. 
The red-whiskered man went to the point at once, 
in a manner that showed he had been thinking over 
it all dinner time. 

I say, Pansay, what the deuce was the matter 


26 fHE PHANtOM f RtC&SttA#. 

with you this evening on the Elysium road ? n 
The suddenness of the question wrenched an an- 
swer from me before I was aware. 

“ That! ” said I, pointing to It. 

“ That may be either D. T. or Eyes for aught I 
know. Now you don’t liquor. I saw as much at 
dinner, so it can’t be D. T. There’s nothing what- 
ever where you’re pointing, though you’re sweat- 
ing and trembling with fright like a scared pony. 
Therefore, I conclude that it’s Eyes. And I ought 
to understand all about them. Come along home 
with me. I’m on the Blessington lower road.” 

To my intense delight the ’rickshaw, instead of 
waiting for us, kept about twenty yards ahead — and 
this, too, whether we walked, trotted, or cantered. 
In the course of that long night ride I had told my 
companion almost as much as I have told you here. 

“ Well, you’ve spoilt one of the best tales I’ve 
ever laid tongue to,” said he, “ but I’ll forgive you 
for the sake of what you’ve gone through. Now 
come home and do what I tell you; and when I’ve 
cured you, young man, let this be a lesson to you 
to steer clear of women and indigestible food till 
the day of your death.” 

The ’rickshaw kept steadily in front; and my red- 
whiskered friend seemed to derive great pleasure 
from my account of its exact whereabouts. 

“ Eyes, Pansay — all Eyes, Brain, and Stomach. 
And the greatest of these three is Stomach. 
You’ve too much conceited Brain, too little 
Stomach, and thoroughly unhealthy Eyes. Get 


fill PHANTOM 'klCKSHAW. kj 

Jrour Stomach straight and the rest follows. And 
all that’s French for a liver pill. I’ll take sole 
medical charge of you from this hour! for you’re 
too interesting a phenomenon to be passed 
over.” 

By this time we were deep in the shadow of the 
Blessington lower road and the ’rickshaw came to 
a dead stop under a pine-clad, overhanging shale 
cliff. Instinctively I halted too, giving my reason. 
Heatherlegh rapped out an oath. 

“ Now, if you think I’m going to spend a cold 
night on the hillside for the sake of a Stomach- 
cum-Brain-cum-Eye illusion . . . Lord, ha’ 
mercy! What’s that? ” 

There was a muffled report, a blinding smother 
of dust just in front of us, a crack, the noise of rent 
boughs, and about ten yards of the cliff-side — 
pines, undergrowth, and all — slid down into the 
road below, completely blocking it up. The up- 
rooted trees swayed and tottered for a moment 
like drunken giants in the gloom, and then fell 
prone among their fellows with a thunderous crash. 
Our two horses stood motionless and sweating 
with fear. As soon as the rattle of falling earth 
and stone had subsided, my companion muttered: 
“ Man, if we’d gone forward we should have been 
ten feet deep in our graves by now. ‘ There are 
more things in heaven and earth ’ . . . Come 
home, Pansay, and thank God. I want a peg 
badly.” 

L We retraced our way over the Church Ridge, 


the phantom s rickshaW. 

and I arrived at Dr. Heatherlegh’s house shortly 
after midnight. 

His attempts toward my cure commenced al- 
most immediately, and for a week I never left his 
sight. Many a time in the course of that week did 
I bless the good-fortune which had thrown me in 
contact with Simla’s best and kindest doctor. Day 
by day my spirits grew lighter and more equable. 
Day by day, too, I became more and more inclined 
to fall in with Heatherlegh’s “ spectral illusion ” 
theory, implicating eyes, brain, and stomach. I 
wrote to Kitty, telling her that a slight sprain, 
caused by a fall from my horse, kept me indoors for 
a few days; and that I should be recovered before 
she had time to regret my absence. 

Heatherlegh’s treatment was simple to a degree. 
It consisted of liver pills, cold-water baths, and 
strong exercise, taken in the dusk or at early dawn 
— for, as he sagely observed: “A man with a 
sprained ankle doesn’t walk a dozen miles a day, 
and your young woman might be wondering if she 
saw you.” 

At the end of the week, after much examination 
of pupil and pulse, and strict injunctions as to diet 
and pedestrianism, Heatherlegh dismissed me as 
brusquely as he had taken charge of me. Here is 
his parting benediction: “ Man, I certify to your 
mental cure, and that’s as much as to say I’ve cured 
most of your bodily ailments. Now, get your 
traps out of this as soon as you can; and be off t-0 
snake love to Miss Kitty.” 


THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW. 2$ 

I was endeavoring to express my thanks for his 
kindness. He cut me short. 

“ Don’t think I did this because I like you. I 
gather that you’ve behaved like a. blackguard all 
through. But, all the same, you’re a phenomenon, 
and as queer a phenomenon as you are a black- 
guard. No! ” — checking me a second time — “not 
a rupee, please. Go out and see if you can find the 
eyes-brain-and-stomach business again. I’ll give 
you a lakh for each time you see it.” 

Half an hour later I was in the Mannerings’ 
drawing room with Kitty — drunk with the intoxi- 
cation of present happiness and the foreknowledge 
that I should never more be troubled with Its 
hideous presence. Strong in the sense of my new- 
found security, I proposed a ride at once; and, by 
preference, a canter round Jakko. 

Never had I felt so well, so overladen with vi- 
tality and mere animal spirits, as I did on the after- 
noon of the 30th of April. Kitty was delighted at 
the change in my appearance, and complimented 
me on it in her delightfully frank and outspoken 
manner. We left the Mannerings’ house together, 
laughing and talking, and cantered along the 
Chota Simla road as of old. 

I was in haste to reach the Sanjowlie Reservoir 
and there make my assurance doubly sure. The 
horses did their best, but seemed all too slow to my 
impatient mind. Kitty was astonished at my bois- 
tcrousness. “ Why, Jack! ” she cried at last, “ you 
are behaving like a child. What are you doing? ” 


30 


THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. 


We were just below the Convent, and from sheer 
wantonness I was making my Waler plunge and 
curvet across the road as I tickled it with the loop 
of my riding-whip. 

“ Doing? ” I answered; “ nothing, dear. That’s 
just it. If you’d been doing nothing for a week 
except lie up, you’d be as riotous as I. 

** ‘ Singing and murmuring in your feastful mirth, 

Joying to feel yourself alive ; 

Lord over Nature, Lord of the visible Earth, 

Lord of the senses five.' ” 

My quotation was hardly out of my lips before 
we had rounded the corner above the Convent; and 
a few yards further on could see across to San- 
jowlie. In the center of the level road stood the 
black and white liveries, the yellow-paneled ’rick- 
shaw, and Mrs. Keith- Wessington. I pulled up, 
looked, rubbed my eyes, and, I believe, must have 
said something. The next thing I knew was that 
I was lying face downward on the road, with Kitty 
kneeling above me in tears. 

“ Has it gone, child?” I gasped. Kitty only 
wept more bitterly. 

“ Has what gone, Jack, dear? what does it all 
mean? There must be a mistake somewhere, Jack. 
A hideous mistake.” Her last words brought me 
to my feet — mad — raving for the time being. * 

“ Yes, there is a mistake somewhere,” I repeated* 
“ a hideous mistake. Come and look at It.” 

I have an indistinct idea that I dragged Kitty 
by the wrist along the road up to where It stood* 


THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW. 


3 1 


and implored her for pity’s sake to speak to It ; to 
tell It that we were betrothed; that neither Death 
nor Hell could break the tie between us: and Kitty 
only knows how much more to the same effect 
Now and again I appealed passionately to the Ter- 
ror in the ’rickshaw to bear witness to all I had 
said, and to release me from a torture that was kill- 
ing me. As I talked I suppose I must have told 
Kitty of my old relations with Mrs. Wessington, 
for I saw her listen intently with white face and 
blazing eyes. 

“ Thank you, Mr. Pansay,” she said, “ that’s 
quite enough. Syce ghora lao.” 

The syce, impassive as Orientals always are, had 
come up with the recaptured horses; and as Kitty 
sprang into her saddle I caught hold of the bridle, 
entreating her to hear me out and forgive. My 
answer was the cut of her riding-whip across my 
face from mouth to eye, and a word or two of fare- 
well that even now I cannot write down. So I 
judged, and judged rightly, that Kitty knew all; 
and I staggered back to the side of the ’rickshaw. 
\My face was cut and bleeding, and the blow of the 
riding-whip had raised a livid blue wheal on it. I 
had no self-respect. Just then, Heatherlegh, who 
must have been following Kitty and me at a dis- 
tance, cantered up. j 

“ Doctor,” I said, pointing to my face, “ here’s 
Miss Mannering’s signature to my order of dis- 
missal and . . . I’ll thank you for that lakh as 
soon as convenient.” 


3 * 


THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW. 


Heatherlegh’s face, even in my abject misery, 
moved me to laughter. 

“ I’ll stake my professional reputation ” — he be- 
gan. “ Don’t be a fool,” I whispered. “ I’ve lost 
my life’s happiness and you’d better take me 
home.” 

As I spoke the ’rickshaw was gone. Then I lost 
all knowledge of what was passing. The crest of 
Jakko seemed to heave and roll like the crest of a 
cloud and fall in upon me. 

Seven days later (on the 7th of May, that is to 
say) I was aware that I was lying in Heatherlegh’s 
room as weak as a little child. Heatherlegh was 
watching me intently from behind the papers on 
his writing-table. His first words were not en- 
couraging; but I was too far spent to be much 
moved by them. 

“ Here’s Miss Kitty has sent back your letters. 
You corresponded a good deal, you young people. 
Here’s a packet that looks like a ring, and a cheer- 
ful sort of a note from Mannering Papa, which I’ve 
taken the liberty of reading and burning. The old 
gentleman’s not pleased with you.” 

“ And Kitty? ” I asked dully. 

“ Rather more drawn than her father, from what 
she says. By the same token you must have been 
letting out any number of queer reminiscences just 
before I met you. ’Says that a man who would 
have behaved to a woman as you did to Mrs. Wes- 
sington ought to kill himself out of sheer pity for 
his kind. She’s a hot-headed little virago, your 




THE PHANTOM ’&ICKSHAW. 


33 


mash. 'Will have it too that you were suffering 
from D. T. when that row on the Jakko road 
turned up. 'Says she'll die before she ever speaks 
to you again." 

I groaned and turned over on the other side. 

“ Now you've got your choice, my friend. This 
engagement has to be broken off; and the Manner- 
ings don't want to be too hard on you. Was it 
broken through D. T. or epileptic fits? Sorry I 
can't offer you a better exchange unless you'd pre- 
fer hereditary insanity. Say the word and I'll tell 
'em it's fits. All Simla knows about that scene on 
the Ladies' Mile. Come! I'll give you five min- 
utes to think over it." 

During those five minutes I believe that I ex- 
plored thoroughly the lowest circles of the Inferno 
which it is permitted man to tread on earth. And 
at the same time I myself was watching myself fal- 
tering through the dark labyrinths of doubt, 
misery, and utter despair. I wondered, as Heath- 
( erlegh in his chair might have wondered, which 
(dreadful alternative I should adopt. Presently I 
faeard myself answering in a voice that I hardly 
recognized: 

“ They're confoundedly particular about mo- 
rality in these parts. Give 'em fits, Hetherlegh, 
and my love. Now let me sleep a bit longer." 

Then my two selves joined, and it was only I 
(half crazed, devil-driven I) that tossed in my bed, 
tracing step by step the history of the past month. 

“ But I am in Simla,” I kept repeating to myself. 


34 


THE PHANTOM *RICKSHAW. 


“ I, Jack Pansay, am in Simla, and there are no 
ghosts here. It’s unreasonable of that woman ta 
pretend there are. Why couldn’t Agnes have left 
me alone? I never did her any harm. It might 
just as well have been me as Agnes. Only I’d 
never have come back on purpose to kill her. 
Why can’t I be left alone — left alone and happy? ” 

It was high noon when I first awoke: and the 
sun was low in the sky before I slept — slept as the 
tortured criminal sleeps on his rack, too worn to 
feel further pain. 

Next day I could not leave my bed. Heather- 
legh told me in the morning that he had received 
an answer from Mr. Mannering, and that, thanks 
to his (Heatherlegh’s) friendly offices, the story of 
my affliction had traveled through the length and 
breadth of Simla, where I was on all sides much 
pitied. 

“ And that’s rather more than you deserve,” he 
concluded pleasantly, “ though the Lord knows 
you’ve been going through a pretty severe milk 
Never mind; we’ll cure you yet, you perverse phe- 
nomenon.” 

I declined firmly to be cured. “You’ve been 
much too good to me already, old man,” said I; 
“ but I don’t think I need trouble you further.” 

In my heart I knew that nothing Heatherlegh 
could do would lighten the burden that had been 
laid upon me. 

With that knowledge came also a sense of hope- 
less, impotent rebellion against the unreasonable- 


THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. 


35 


ness of it all. There were scores of men no better 
than I whose punishments had at least been re- 
served for another world; and I felt that it was 
bitterly, cruelly unfair that I alone should have 
been singled out for so hideous a fate. This mood 
would in time give place to another where it seemed 
that the ’rickshaw and I were the only realities in 
} a world of shadows; that Kitty was a gdiost; that 
! Mannering, Heatherlegh, and all the other men 
and women I knew were all ghosts; and the great, 
gray hills themselves but vain shadows devised to 
torture me. From mood to mood I tossed back- 
ward and forward for seven weary days; my body 
growing daily stronger and stronger, until the bed- 
room looking-glass told me that I had returned to 
every-day life, and was as other men once more 
Curiously enough my face showed no signs of the 
struggle I had gone through. It was pale indeed, 
but as expressionless and commonplace as ever. I 
had expected some permanent alteration — visible 
evidence of the disease that was eating me away. I 
found nothing. 

On the 15th of May I left Heatherlegh’s house 
at eleven o’clock in the morning; and the instinct 
of the bachelor drove me to the Club. There I 
found that every man knew my story as told by 
Heatherlegh, and was, in clumsy fashion, abnor- 
mally kind and attentive. Nevertheless I recog- 
nized that for the rest of my natural life I should 
be among but not of my fellows; and I envied very 
bitterly indeed the laughing coolies on the Mall be- 


THE PHANTOM 'rISKSHAW. 


36 

low. I lunched at the Club, and at four o’clock wan- 
dered aimlessly down the Mall in the vague hope of 
meeting Kitty. Close to the Band-stand the black 
and white liveries joined me; and I heard Mrs. 
Wessington’s old appeal at my side. I had been 
expecting this ever since I came out; and was only 
surprised at her delay. The phantom ’rickshaw 
and I went side by side along the Chota Simla road 
in silence. Close to the bazaar, Kitty and a man 
on horseback overtook and passed us. For any 
sign she gave I might have been a dog in the road. 
She did not even pay me the compliment of quick- 
ening her pace; though the rainy afternoon had 
served for an excuse. _ ' 

So Kitty and her companion, and I and my 
ghostly Light-o’-Love, crept round Jakko in 
couples. The road was streaming with water; the 
pines dripped like roof-pipes on the rocks below, 
and the air was full of fine, driving rain. Two or 
three times I found myself saying to myself almost 
aloud: “ I’m Jack Pansay on leave at Simla — at 
Simla! Everyday, ordinary Simla. I mustn’t for- 
get that— -I mustn’t forget that.” Then I would 
try to recollect some of the gossip I had heard at 
the Club: the prices of So-and-So’s horses— any- 
thing, in fact, that related to the work-a-day Anglo- 
Indian world I knew so well. I even repeated the 
multiplication-table rapidly to myself, to make 
quite sure that I was not taking leave of my senses. 
It gave me much comfort; and must have pre- 
vented my hearing Mrs. Wessington for a time. 


THE THAjfTOUi ’RICKSHAW. 3? 

Once more I wearily climbed the Convent slope 
and entered the level road. Here Kitty and the 
man started off at a canter, and I was left alone 
with Mrs. Wessington. “ Agnes,” said I, “ will 
you put back your hood and tell me what it all 
means?” The hood dropped noiselessly,- and I 
was face to face with my dead and buried mistress. 
She was wearing the dress in which I had last seen 
her alive; carried the same tiny handkerchief in her 
right hand ; and the same card-case in her left. (A 
woman eight months’ dead with a card-case!) I 
had to pin myself down to the multiplication-table, 
and to set both hands on the stone parapet of the 
road, to assure myself that that at least was real. 

“ Agnes,” I repeated, “ for pity’s sake tell me 
what it all means.” Mrs. Wessington leant for- 
ward, with that odd, quick turn of the head I used 
to knorv so well, and spoke. 

If my story had not already so madly overleaped 
the bounds of all human belief I should apologize 
to you now. As I know that no one — no, not 
even Kitty, for whom it is written as some sort of 
justification of my conduct — will believe me, I will 
go on. Mrs. Wessington spoke and I walked with 
her, from the Sanjowlie road to the turning below 
the Commander-in-Chief’s house, as I might walk 
by the side of any living woman’s ’rickshaw, deep 
in conversation. The second and most tormenting 
of my moods of sickness had suddenly laid hold 
upon me, and like the Prince in Tennyson’s poem, 
“ I seemed to move amid a world of ghosts.” 


$8 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW. 

There had been a garden-party at the Commander- 
in-Chief’s, and we two joined the crowd of home- 
ward-bound folk. As I saw them then it seemed 
that they were the shadows — impalpable fantastic 
shadows — that divided for Mrs. Wessington’s ’rick- 
shaw to pass through. What we said during the 
course of that weird interview I cannot — indeed, I 
dare not — tell. Heatherlegh’s comment would 
have been a short laugh and a remark that I had 
been “ mashing a brain-eye-and-stomach chimera.” 
It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a 
marvelously dear experience. Could it be possible, 
I wondered, that I was in this life to woo a second 
time the woman I had killed by my own neglect 
and cruelty? 

I met Kitty on the homeward road — a shadow 
among shadows. 

If I were to describe all the incidents of the next 
fortnight in their order, my story would never 
come to an end; and your patience would be ex- 
hausted. Morning after morning and evening 
after evening the ghostly ’rickshaw and I used to 
wander through Simla together. Wherever I went 
there the four black and white liveries followed me 
and bore me company to and from my hotel. At 
the Theater I found them amid the crowd of yelling 
jhampanies; outside the Club veranda, after a long 
evening of whist; at the Birthday Ball, waiting pa- 
tiently for my reappearance; and in broad daylight 
when I went calling. Save that it cast no shadow, 
the ’rickshaw was in every respect as real to look 


THE RHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. 39 

upon as one of wood and iron. More than once, 
indeed, I have had to check myself from warning 
some hard-riding friend against cantering over it. 
More than once I have walked down the Mall deep 
in conversation with Mrs. Wessington to the un- 
speakable amazement of the passers-by. 

Before I had been out and about a week I 
learned that the “ fit ” theory had been discarded in 
favor of insanity. However, I made no change in 
my mode of life. I called, rode, and dined out as 
freely as ever. I had a passion for the society of 
my kind which I had never felt before; I hungered 
to be among the realities of life; and at the same 
time I felt vaguely unhappy when I had been sepa- 
rated too long from my ghostly companion. It 
would be almost impossible to describe my varying 
moods from the 1 5th of May up to to-day. 

The presence of the ’rickshaw filled me by turns 
with horror, blind fear, a dim sort of pleasure, and 
utter despair. I dared not leave Simla; and I knew 
that my stay there was killing me. I knew, more- 
over, that it was my destiny to die slowly and a 
little every day. My only anxiety was to get the 
penance over as quietly as might be. Alternately I 
hungered for a sight of Kitty and watched her out- 
rageous flirtations with my successor — to speak 
more accurately, my successors — with amused 
interest. She was as much out of my life as I was 
out of hers. By day I wandered with Mrs. Wes- 
eington, almost content. By night I implored 
Heaven to let me return to the world as I used to 




4a 'the phantom ’rickshaw. 

know it. Above all these varying moods lay the 
sensation of dull, numbing wonder that the Seen 
and the Unseen should mingle so strangely on this 
earth to hound one poor soul to its grave. 

August 27. — Heatherlegh has been indefatigable 
in his attendance on me; and only yesterday told 
me that I ought to send in an application for sick 
leave. An application to escape the company of a 
phantom! A request that the Government would 
graciously permit me to get rid of five ghosts and 
an airy ’rickshaw by going to England! Heather- 
legh’s proposition moved me to almost hysterical 
laughter. I told him that I should await the end 
quietly at Simla; and I am sure that the end is not 
far off. Believe me that I dread its advent more 
than any word can say; and I torture myself nightly 
with a thousand speculations as to the manner of 
my death. 

Shall I die in my bed decently and as an English 
gentleman should die; or, in one last walk on the 
Mall, will my soul be wrenched from me to take 
its place forever and ever by the side of that ghastly 
phantasm? Shall I return to my old lost allegiance 
in the next world, or shall I meet Agnes loathing 
her and bound to her side through all eternity? 
Shall we two hover over the scene of our lives till 
the end of Time? As the day of my death draws 
nearer, the intense horror that all living flesh feels 
toward escaped spirits from beyond the grave 
grows more and more powerful. It is an awful 


THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW. 4j 

thing' to go down quick among the dead with 
scarcely one-half of your life completed. It is a 
thousand times more awful to wait as I do in your 
midst, for I know not what unimaginable terror. 
Pity me, at least on the score of my “ delusion,” for 
[ know you will never believe what I have written 
here. Yet as surely as ever a man was done to 
death by the Powers of Darkness I am that man. 

In justice, too, pity her. For as surely as ever 
woman was killed by man, I killed Mrs. Wessing- 
ton. And the last portion of my punishment is 
even now upon me. 


MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY. 


As I came through the Desert thus it was — 

As I came through the Desert. 

— The City of Drsadful Nig hi. 

Somewhere in the Other World, where there are 
hooks and pictures and plays and shop-windows to 
look at, and thousands of men who spend their 
lives in building up all four, lives a gentleman who 
writes real stories about the real insides of people; 
and his name is Mr. Walter Besant. But he will 
insist upon treating his ghosts — he has published 
half a workshopful of them — with levity. He 
makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some 
cases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms. You 
may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular 
Paper, with levity; but you must behave reverently 
toward a ghost, and particularly an Indian one. 

There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form 
of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near 
the roadside till a traveler passes. Then they drop 
upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible 
ghosts of women who have died in child-bed. 
These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide 
in the crops near a village, and call seductively* 
But to answer their call is death in this world and 

4 * 




MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY. 


43 


the next. Their feet are turned backward that all 
sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts 
of little children who have been thrown into wells. 
These haunt well-curbs and the fringes of jungles, 
and wail under the stars, or catch women by the 
wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These 
and the corpse-ghosts, however, are only vernacu- 
lar articles and do not attack Sahibs. No native 
ghost has yet been authentically reported to have 
frightened an Englishman; but many English 
ghosts have scared the life out of both white and 
black. 

Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There 
are said to be two at Simla, not counting the 
woman who blows the bellows at Syree dak-bunga- 
low on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house 
haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is 
supposed to do night-watchman round a house in 
Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of their houses 
“ repeats ” on autumn evenings all the incidents of 
a horrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murrey 
has a merry ghost, and, now that she has bees 
swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful 
one; there are Officers’ Quarters in Mian Mir 
whose doors open without reason, and whose fur- 
niture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of 
June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to 
lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses 
that none will willingly rent; and there is some- 
thing — not fever — wrong with a big bungalow in 
Allahabad. The older Provinces simply bristle 


44 mV owk true ghost story. 

with haunted houses, and march phantom armies 
along their main thoroughfares. 

Some of the dak-bungalows on the Grand Trunk 
Road have handy little cemetei'ies in their com- 
pound — witnesses to the “ changes and chances of 
this mortal life,’ 5 in the days when men drove from 
Calcutta to the Northwest. These bungalow's are 
objectionable places to put up in. They are gener- 
ally very old, always dirty, while the khansamah is 
as ancient as the bungalow. He either chatters 
senilely, or falls into the long trances of age. In 
both moods he is useless. If you get angry with 
him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these 
thirty years, and says that when he was in that 
Sahib’s service not a khansamah in the Province 
could touch him. Then he jabbers and mows and 
trembles and fidgets among the dishes, and you re- 
pent of your irritation. 

In these dak-bungalows ghosts are most likely 
( to be found, and when found, they should be made a 
’ note of. Not long ago it was my business to live 
in dak-bungalows. I never inhabited the same house 
for three nights running, and grew to be learned in 
the breed. I lived in Government-built ones with 
red brick walls and rail ceilings, an inventory of the 
furniture posted in every room, and an excited 
snake at the threshold to give welcome. I lived in 
“ converted ” ones — old houses officiating as dak- 
bungalows — wffiere nothing was in its proper place 
and there wasn’t even a fowl for dinner. I lived in 
second-hand palaces where the wind blew through 


MV OWN TRUE ©HOST STORY. 45 

©pen-work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as 
through a broken pane. I lived in dak-bungalows 
where the last entry in the visitors’ book was fifteen 
months old, and where they slashed off the curry- 
kid’s head with a sword. It was my good-luck to 
meet all sorts of men, from sober-traveling mis- 
sionaries and deserters flying from British Regi- 
ments, to drunken loafers who threw whisky- 
bottles at all who passed; and my still greater good- 
fortune just to escape a maternity case. Seeing 
that a fair proportion of the tragedy of our lives out 
here acted itself in dak-bungalows, I wondered that 
I had met no ghosts. A ghost that would volun- 
tarily hang about a dak-bungalow would be mad of 
course; but so many men have died mad in dak- 
bungalows that there must be a fair percentage of 
lunatic ghosts. 

In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, 
for there were two of them. Up till that hour I 
had sympathized with Mr. Besant’s method of 
handling them, as shown in “ The Strange Case of 
Mr. Lucraft and other Stories.” T am now in the 
Opposition. 

We will call the bungalow Katmal dak-bunga- 
low. But that was the smallest part of the horror. 
A man with a sensitive hide has no right to sleepy in 
dak-bungalows. He should marry. Katmal dak- 
bungalow was old and rotten and unrepaired. The 
floor was of worn brick, the walls were filthy, and 
the windows were nearly black with grime. It 
stood -on a bypath largely used by native Sub- 


46 MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY. 

Deputy Assistants of all kinds, from Finance to 
Forests; but real Sahibs were rare. The khansa- 
mah, who was nearly bent double with old age, 
said so. 

When I arrived, there was a fitful, undecided rain 
on the fare of the land, accompanied by a restless 
wind, and ev^ry gust made a noise like the rattling 
of dry bones in the stiff toddy-palms outside. The 
khansamah completely lost his head on my arrival. 
He had served a Sahib once. Did I know that 
Sahib? He gave me the name of a well-known 
man who has been buried for more than a quarter 
of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreo- 
type of that man in his prehistoric youth. I had 
seen a steel engraving of him at the head of a 
double volume of Memoirs a month before, and I 
felt ancient beyond telling. 

The day shut in and the khansamah went to get 
me food. He did not go through the pretense of 
calling it “ khana ” — man's victuals. He said 
“ ratub,” and that means, among other things, 
“ grub ” — dog's rations. There was no insult in 
his choice of the term. He had forgotten the 
other word, I suppose. 

While he was cutting up the dead bodies of ani- 
mals, I settled myself down, after exploring the 
dak-bungalow. There were three rooms, beside 
my own, which was a corner kennel, each giving 
into the other through dingy white doors fastened 
with long iron bars. The bungalow was a very 
solid one, but the partition-walls of the rooms were 


MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY. 


47 


almost jerry-built in their flimsiness. Every step 
or bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the 
other three, and every footfall came back tremu- 
lously from the far walls. For this reason I shut 
the door. There were no lamps — only candles in 
long glass shades. An oil wick was set in the bath- 
room. 

For bleak, unadultered misery that dak- 
bungalow was the worst of the many that I had 
ever set foot in. There was no fireplace, and the 
windows would not open; so a brazier of charcoal 
would have been useless. The rain and the wind 
splashed and gurgled and moaned round the house, 
and the toddy-palms rattled and roared. Half a 
dozen jackals went through the compound ringing, 
and a hyena stood afar off and mocked them. A 
hyena would convince a Sadducee of the Resurrec- 
tion of the Dead — the worst sort of Dead. Then 
came the ratub — a curious meal, half native and 
half English in composition — with the old khan- 
samah babbling behind my chair about dead and 
gone English people, and the wind-blown candles 
playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the mos- 
quito-curtains. It was just the sort of dinner and 
evening to make a man think of every single one of 
his past sins, and of all the others that he intended 
to commit if he lived. 

Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not easy. 
The lamp in the bath-room threw the most absurd 
shadows into the room, and the wind was begin- 
ning to talk nonsense; 


MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY. 


Just when the reasons were drowsy with blood- 
sucking I heard the regular — “ Let-us-take-and- 
heave-him-over ” grunt of doolie-bearers in the 
compound. First one doolie came in, then a sec- 
ond, and then a third. I heard the doolies dumped 
on the ground, and the shutter in front of my door 
shook. “ That's someone trying to come in,” I 
said. But no one spoke, and I persuaded myself 
that it was the gusty wind. The shutter of the 
room next to mine was attacked, flung back, and 
the inner door opened. “ That's some Sub-Deputy 
Assistant,” I said, “ and he has brought his friends 
with him. Now they'll talk and spit and smoke for 
an hour.” 

But there were no voices and no footsteps. No 
one was putting his luggage into the next room. 
The door shut, and I thanked Providence that I 
was to be left in peace. But I was curious to know 
where the doolies had gone. I got out of bed and 
looked into the darkness. There was never a sign 
of a doolie. Just as I was getting into bed again, 
I heard, in the next room, the sound that no man 
in his senses can possibly mistake — the whir of a 
billiard ball down the length of the slates when the 
striker is stringing for break. No other sound is 
like it. A minute afterward there was another 
whir, and I got into bed. I was not frightened — 
indeed I was not. I was very curious to know 
what had become of the doolies. I jumped into 
bed for that reason. 

Next minute I heard the double click of a cannon 


MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY. ' 49 

and my hair sat up. It is a mistake to say that hair 
stands up. The skin of the head tightens and you 
ean feel a faint, prickly bristling all over the scalp. 
That is the hair sitting up. 

There was a whir and a click, and both sounds 
could only have been made by one thing — a billiard 
ball. I argued the matter out at great length with 
myself; and the more I argued the less probable it 
seemed that one bed, one table, and two chairs — 
all the furniture of the room next to mine — could 
so exactly duplicate the sounds of a game of bil- 
liards. After another cannon, a three-cushion one 
to judge by the whir, I argued no more. I had 
found my ghost and would have given worlds to 
have escaped from that dak-bungalow. I listened, ! 
and with each listen the game grew clearer. There 
was whir on whir and click on click. Sometimes 
there was a double click and a whir and another 
click. Beyond any sort of doubt, people were 
playing billiards in the next room. And the next 
room was not big enough to hold a billiard table! 

I Between the pauses of the wind I heard the garme 
go forward — stroke after stroke. I tried to believe 
that I could not hear voices ; but that attempt was 
a failure. 

Do you know what fear is? Not ordinary fear 
of insult, injury or death, but abject, quivering 
dread of something that you cannot see — fear that 
dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat 
— fear that makes you sweat on the palms of the 
hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula at work? , 


SO MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY, 

This is a fine Fear — a great cowardice, and must be 
felt to be appreciated. The very improbability of 
billiards in a dak-bungalow proved the reality of 
the thing. No man — drunk or sober — could 
imagine a game at billiards, or invent the spitting 
crack of a “ screw-cannon/’ 
r A severe course of dak-bungalows has this disad- 
vantage — it breeds infinite credulity. If a man 
said to a confirmed dak-bungalow-hunter: “ There 
is a corpse in the next room, and there’s a mad girl 
in the next but one, and the woman and m&n on 
that camel have just eloped from a place sixty miles 
away,” the hearer would not disbelieve because he 
would know that nothing is too wild, grotesque, or 
horrible to happen in a dak-bungalow. 

This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts. 
A rational person, fresh 'from his own house, would 
have turned on his side and slept. I did not. So 
surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the 
scores of things in the bed because the bulk of my 
blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear every! 
stroke of a long game at billiards played in the 
echoing room behind the iron-barred door. My 
dominant fear was that the players might want a 
marker. It was an absurd fear; because creatures 
who could play in the dark would be above such 
superfluities. I only know that that was my ter- 
ror; and it was real. 

After a long, long while, the game stopped, and 
the door banged. I slept because I was dead tired. 
Otherwise I should have preferred to have kept 


MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY. 5 1 

awake. Not for everything in Asia would I have 
dropped the door-bar and peered into the dark of 
the next room. 

When the morning came, I considered that I had 
done well and wisely, and inquired for the means of 
departure. 

“ By the way, khansamah,” I said, “ what were 
those three doolies doing in my compound in the 
night? ” 

“ There were no doolies,” said the khansamah. 

I went into the next room, and the daylight 
streamed through the open door. I was im- 
mensely brave. I would, at that hour, have played 
Black Pool with the owner of the big Black Pool 
down below. 

“ Has this place always been a dak-bungalow? ” 
I asked. 

“ No,” said the khansamah. “ Ten or twenty 
years ago, I have forgotten how long, it was a bil- 
liard-room. 

“ A how much? ” 

“ A billiard-room for the Sahibs who built the 
Railway. I was khansamah then in the big house 
where all the Railway-Sahibs lived, and I used to 
come across with brandy-shrub. These three 
rooms were all one, and they held a big table on 
which the Sahibs played every evening. But the 
Sahibs are all dead now, and the Railway runs, you 
say, nearly to Kabul.” 

“Do you remember anything about the Sahibs?” 

“ It is long ago, but I remember that one Sahib, 


52 


MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY. 


a fat man and always angry, was playing here one 
night, and he said to me: ‘ Mangal Khan, brandy- 
pani do,’ and I filled the glass, and he bent over 
the table to strike, and his head fell lower and lower 
till it hit the table, and his spectacles came off, and 
when we — the Sahibs and I myself — ran to lift him 
he was dead. I helped to carry him out. Aha, he 
was a strong Sahib! But he is dead and I, old 
Mangal Khan, am still living, by your favor.” 

That was more than enough ! I had my ghost — 
a first-hand, authenticated article. I would write 
to the Society for Psychical Research — I would 
paralyze the Empire with the news! But I would, 
first of all, put eighty miles of assessed crop-land 
between myself and that dale-bungalow before 
nightfall. The Society might send their regular 
agent to investigate later on. 

I went into my own room and prepared to pack 
after noting down the facts of the case. As I 
smoked I heard the game begin again — with a miss 
in balk this time, for the whir was a short one. 

The door was open and I could see into the 
room. Click — click! That was a cannon. I 
entered the room without fear, for there was sun- 
light within and a fresh breeze without. The un- 
seen game was going on at a tremendous rate. 
And well it might, — when a restless little rat was 
running to and fro inside the dingy ceiling-cloth, 
and a piece of loose window-sash was making fifty 
breaks off the window-bolt as it shook in the 
breeze ! 


MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY. $3 

Impossible to mistake the. sound of billard balk! 
Impossible to mistake the whir of a ball over the 
slate! But I was to be excused. Even when I 
shut my enlightened eyes the sound was marvel- 
ously like that of a fast game. 

Entered angrily the faithful partner of my sor- 
rows, Kadir Baksh. 

“ This bungalow is very bad and low-caste! No 
wonder the Presence was disturbed and is speckled. 
Three sets of doolie-bearers came to the bungalow 
late last night when I was sleeping outside, and 
said that it was their custom to rest in the rooms 
set apart for the English people! What honor has 
the khansamah? They tried to enter, but I told 
them to go. No wonder, if these Oorias have been 
here, that the Presence is sorely spotted. It is 
shame, and the work of a dirty man! ” 

Kadir Baksh did not say that he had taken from 
each gang - two annas for rent in advance, and then, 
beyond my earshot, had beaten them with the big 
green umbrella whose use I could never before 
divine. But Kadir Baksh has no notions oi 
morality. 

There was an interview with the khansamah, but, 
as he promptly lost his head, wrath gave place to 
pity, and pity led to a long conversation, in the 
course of which he put the fat Engineer-Sahib’s 
tragic death in three separate stations — two of 
them fifty miles away. The third shift was to Cal- 
cutta, and there the Sahib died while driving a dog-* 
cart. 


§4 Si¥ OWN TRUE GHOSt StORtf. 

If I had encouraged him the khansamah would 
have wandered all through Bengal with his corpse. 

I did not go away as soon as I intended. I 
stayed for the night, while the wind and the rat and 
the sash and the window-bolt played a ding-dong 
“ hundred and fifty up."' Then the wind ran out 
and the billiards stopped, and I felt that I had 
ruined my one genuine, hall-marked ghost-story. 

Had I only stopped at the proper time, I coul'* 
have made anything out of it. 

That was the bitterest thought of alii 




THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE 
JUKES. 

Alive or dead — there is no other way . — Native Proverb. 

There is, as the conjurers say, no deception 
about this tale. Jukes by accident stumbled upon 
a village that is well known to exist, though he is 
the only Englishman who has been there. A some- 
what similar institution used tO' flourish on the out- 
skirts of Calcutta, and there is a story that if you 
go into the heart of Bikanir, which is in the heart 
of the Great Indian Desert, you shall come across 
not a village but a town where the Dead who did 
not die, but may not live, have established their 
headquarters. And, since it is perfectly true that 
in the same Desert is a wonderful city where all the 
rich money-lenders retreat after they have made 
their fortunes (fortunes so vast that the owners 
cannot trust even the strong hand of the Govera- 
ment to protect them, but take refuge in the water- 
less sands), and drive sumptuous C-spring 
barouches, and buy beautiful girls and decorate 
their palaces with gold and ivory and Minton tiles 
and mother-o’-pearl, I do not see why Jukes’ tale 
should not be true. He is a Civil Engineer, with a 
head for plans and distances and things of that 
ts 


§6 THE STRANGE RlbB ©F MORROiVBIB JUKSS. 

kind, and he certainly would not take the trouble 
to invent imaginary traps. He could earn more 
by doing his legitimate work. He never varies the 
tale in the telling, and grows very hot and indig- 
nant when he thinks of the disrespectful treatment 
he received. He wrote this quite straightforwardly 
at first, but he has since touched it up in places and 
introduced Moral Reflections, thus: 

In the beginning it all arose from a slight attack 
of fever. My work necessitated my being in camp 
for some months between Pakpattan and Mubarak- 
pur — a desolate sandy stretch of country, as every- 
one who has had the misfortune to go there may 
know. My coolies were neither more nor less 
exasperating than other gangs, and my work de- 
manded sufficient attention to keep me from mop- 
ing, had I been inclined to so unmanly a weakness. 

On the 23d December, 1884, I felt a little 
feverish. There was a full moon at the time, and, 
in consequence, every dog near my tent was baying 
it. The brutes assembled in twos and threes and 
drove me frantic. A few days previously I had 
shot one loud-mouthed singer and suspended his 
carcass in terrorem about fifty yards from my tent- 
door. But his friends fell upon, fought for, and 
ultimately devoured the body: and, as it seemed to 
me, sang their hymns of thanksgiving afterward 
with renewed energy. 

The light-headedness which accompanies fever 
acts differently on different men. My irritation 


fHE STRANSE RISE OR M0RRQWBIE JUStfcS. $f 

gave way, after a short time, to a fixed determina- 
tion to slaughter one huge black and white beast 
who had been foremost in song and first in flight 
t throughout the evening. Thanks to a shaking 
hand and a giddy head I had already missed him 
twice with both barrels of my shotgun, when it 
struck me that my best plan would be to ride him 
down in the open and finish him off with a hog- 
spear. This, of course, was merely the semi- 
delirious notion of a fever patient; but I remember 
that it struck me at the time as being eminently 
practical and feasible. 

I therefore ordered my groom to saddle Pornic 
and bring him round quietly to the rear of my tent. 
When the pony was ready, I stood at his head pre- 
pared to mount and dash out as soon as the dog 
should again lift up his voice. Pornic, by the way, 
had not been out of his pickets for a couple of days; 
the night air was crisp and chilly; and I was armed 
with a specially long and sharp pair of persuaders 
with which I had been rousing a sluggish cob that 
afternoon. You will easily believe, then, that 
when he was let go he went quickly. In one mo- 
ment, for the brute bolted as straight as a die, the 
tent was left far behind, and we were flying over 
the smooth sandy soil at racing speed. In an- 
other we had passed the wretched dog, and I had 
almost forgotten why it was that I had taken horse 
and hog-spear. 

The delirium of fever and the excitement of rapid 
motion through the air must have taken away the 


1 V ^ 


58 THE STRANGE RIDE OF RiORROWBIE JUR.E8. 

remnant of my senses. I have a faint recollection 
of standing upright in my stirrups, and of brandish- 
ing my hog-spear at the great white Moon that 
looked down so calmly on my mad gallop; and of 
shouting challenges to the camel-thorn bushes as 
they whizzed past. Once or twice, I believe I 
swayed forward on Pornic’s neck, and literally 
hung on by my spurs — as the marks next morning 
showed. 

The wretched beast went forward like a thing 
possessed, over what seemed to be a limitless ex- 
panse of moonlit sand. Next, I remember, the 
ground rose suddenly in front of us, and as we 
topped the ascent I saw the waters of the Sutlej 
shining like a silver bar below. Then Pornic blun- 
dered heavily on his nose, and we rolled together 
down some unseen slope. 

I must have lost consciousness, for when I re- 
covered I was lying on my stomach in a heap of 
soft white sand, and the dawn was beginning to 
break dimly over the edge of the slope down which 
I had fallen. As the light grew stronger I saw that 
I was at the bottom of a horseshoe-shaped crater of 
sand, opening on one side directly on to the shoals 
of the Sutlej. My fever had altogether left me, 
and, with the exception of a slight dizziness in the 
head, I felt no bad effects from the fall over night. 

Pornic, who was standing a few yards away, was 
, naturally a good deal exhausted, but had not hurt 
himself in the least. His saddle, a favorite polo 
’©ne, was much knocked about, and had been 


the strange ride of morrowbie jokes. s4 

{ 

twisted under his belly. It took me some time to 
put him to rights, and in the meantime I had ample 
opportunities of observing the spot into which I 
had so foolishly dropped. 

At the risk of being considered tedious, I must 
describe it at length; inasmuch as an accurate men- 
tal picture of its peculiarities will be of material 
assistance in enabling the reader to understand 
what follows. 

Imagine then, as I have said before, a horseshoe- 
shaped crater of sand with steeply graded sand 
walls about thirty-five feet high. (The slope, I 
fancy, must have been about 65 0 .) This crater 
inclosed a level piece of ground about fifty yards 
long by thirty at its broadest part, with a rude well 
in the center. Round the bottom of the crater, 
about three feet from the level of the ground 
proper, ran a series of eighty-three semicircular, 
ovoid, square, and multilateral holes, all about 
three feet at the mouth. Each hole on inspection 
showed that it was carefully shored internally with 
drift-wood and bamboos, and over the mouth a 
wooden drip-board projected, like the peak of a 
jockey’s cap, for two feet. No sign of life was visi- 
ble in these tunnels, but a most sickening stench 
pervaded the entire amphitheater — a stench fouler 
than any which my wanderings in Indian villages 
have introduced me to. 

Having remounted Pornic, who was as anxious 
as I to get back to camp, I rode round the base of 
the horseshoe to find some place whence an exit 


§0 THE STRAMGE RifiB OF MORRO\VBIE JUKES. 


would be practicable. The inhabitants, whoever 
they might be, had not thought fit to put in an ap- 
pearance, so I was left to my own devices. My 
first attempt to “ rush ” Pornic up the steep sand- 
banks showed me that I had fallen into a trap 
exactly on the same model as that which the ant- 
lion sets for its prey. At each step the shifting 
sand poured down from above in tons, and rattled 
on the drip-boards of the holes like small shot. A 
couple of ineffectual charges sent us both rolling 
down to the bottom, half choked with the torrents 
of sand ; and I was constrained to turn my attention 
to the river-bank. '' 

Here everything seemed easy enough. The 
sand hills ran down to the river edge, it is true, but 
there were plenty of shoals and shallows across 
which I could gallop Pornic, and find my way back 
to terra firma by turning sharply to the right or the 
left. As I led Pornic over the sands I was startled 
by the faint pop of a rifle across the river; and at 
the same moment a bullet dropped with a sharp 
" whit ” close to Pornic’s head. 

There was no mistaking the nature of the missile 
— a regulation Martini-Henry “ picket.” About 
five hundred yards away a country-boat was an- 
chored in midstream; and a jet of smoke, drifting 
away from its bows in the still morning air, showed 
me whence the delicate attention had come. Was 
ever a respectable gentleman in such an impasse? 
The treacherous sand slope allowed no escape from 
a spot which I had visited most involuntarily, and ? 


THE STRANSE RIDE ©F MORR0WBIE JUKES. 01 

promenade on the river frontage was the signal for 
a bombardment from some insane native in a boat. 
I’m afraid that I lost my temper very much 
indeed. 

Another bullet reminded me that I had better 
save my breath to cool my porridge; and I re- 
treated hastily up the sands and back to the horse- 
shoe, where I saw that the noise of the rifle had 
drawn sixty-five human beings from the badger- 
holes which I had up till that point supposed to be 
untenanted. I found myself in the midst of a 
crowd of spectators — about forty men, twenty 
women, and one child who could not have been 
more than five years old. They were all scantily 
clothed in that salmon-colored cloth which one ' 
associates with Hindu mendicants, and, at first 
sight, gave me the impression of a band of loath- 
some fakirs. The filth and repulsiveness of the 
assembly were beyond all description, and I shud- 
dered to think what their life in the badger-holes 
must be. 1 

Even in these days, when local self-government 
has destroyed the greater part of a native’s respect 
for a Sahib, I have been accustomed to a certain 
amount of civility from my inferiors, and on ap- 
proaching the crowd naturally expected that there 
would be some recognition of my presence. As a 
matter of fact there was; but it was by no means 
what I had looked for. 

The ragged crew actually laughed at me — such 
laughter I hope I may never hear again. They 


6a THE STRANGE RIDE OF ifORROWBIE JUKES. 

cackled, yelled, whistled, and howled as I walked 
into their midst; some of them literally throwing 
themselves down on the ground in convulsions of 
unholy mirth. In a moment I had let go Pornic’s 
head, and, irritated beyond expression at the morn- 
ing’s adventure, commenced cuffing those nearest 
to me with all the force I could. The wretches 
dropped under my blows like ninepins, and the 
laughter gave place to wails for mercy; while those 
yet untouched clasped me round the knees, implor- 
ing me in all sorts of uncouth tongues to spare 
them. . . 

In the tumult, and just when I was feeling very 
much ashamed of myself for having thus easily 
given way to my temper, a thin, high voice mur- 
mured in English from behind my shoulder: “ Sa- 
hib! Sahib! Do you not know me? Sahib, it is 
Gunga Dass, the telegraph-master.” 

I spun round quickly and faced the speaker. 

Gunga Dass (I have, of course, no hesitation in 
mentioning the man’s real name) I had known four 
years before as a Deccanee Brahmin lent by the 
Punjab Government to one of the Khalsia States. 
He was in charge of a branch telegraph-office 
there, and when I had last met him was a jovial, 
full-stomached, portly Government servant with a 
marvelous capacity for making bad puns in English 
— a peculiarity which made me remember him long 
after I had forgotten his services to me in his offi- 
cial capacity. It is seldom that a Hindu mak^s 
English puns. 


THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 63 

Now, however, the man was changed beyond all 
recognition. Caste-mark, stomach, slate-colored 
continuations, and unctuous speech were all gone. 
I looked at a withered skeleton, turbanless and 
almost naked, with long matted hair and deep-set 
codfish-eyes. But for a crescent-shaped scar on 
the left cheek — the result of an accident for which 
I was responsible — I should never have known 
him. But it was indubitably Gunga Dass, and — ■ 
for this I was thankful — an English-speaking na- 
tive, who might at least tell me the meaning of all 
that I had gone through that day. 

The crowd retreated to some distance as I turned 
toward the miserable figure, and ordered him to 
show me some method of escaping from the crater. 
He held a freshly plucked crow in his hand, and in 
reply to my question climbed slowly on a platform 
of sand which ran in front of the holes, and com- 
menced lighting a fire there in silence. Dried 
bents, sand-poppies, and driftwood burn quickly; 
and I derived much consolation from the fact that 
he lit them with an ordinary sulphur-match. When 
they were in a bright glow, and the crow was neatly 
spitted in front thereof, Gunga Dass began without 
a word of preamble: 

“ There are only two kinds of men, Sar. The 
alive and the dead. When you are dead you are 
dead, but when you are alive you live.” (Here the 
crow demanded his attention for an instant, as it 
twirled before the fire in danger of being burnt to 
a cinder.) “ If you die at home and do not die 


64 the strange ride of moruowbie jukes. 

when you come to the ghat to be burnt, you come 
here.” t 

The nature of the reeking village was made plain 
now, and all that I had known or read of the gro- 
tesque and the horrible paled before the fact just 
communicated by the ex-Brahmin. Sixteen years 
ago, when I first landed in Bombay, I had been 
told by a wandering Armenian of the existence, 
somewhere in India, of a place to which such Hin- 
dus as had the misfortune to recover from trance or 
catalepsy were conveyed and kept, and I recollect 
laughing heartily at what I was then pleased to 
consider a traveler’s tale. Sitting at the bottom of 
the sand-trap, the memory of Watson’s Hotel, with 
its swinging punkahs, white-robed attendants, and 
the sallow-faced Armenian, rose up in my mind as 
vividly as a photograph, and I burst into a loud fit 
of laughter. The contrast was too absurd! 

Gunga Dass, as he bent over the unclean bird, 
watched me curiously. Hindus seldom laugh, and 
his surroundings were not such as to move Gunga 
Dass to any undue excess of hilarity. He removed 
the crow solemnly from the wooden spit and as sol- 
emnly devoured it. Then he continued his story, 
which I give in his own words: < 

“ In epidemics of the cholera you are carried to 
be burnt almost before you are dead. When you 
come to the riverside the cold air, perhaps, makes 
you alive, and then, if you are only little alive, mud 
is put on your nose and mouth and you die conclu- 
sively. If you are rather more alive, more mud is 


THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 65 

put; but if you are too lively they let you go and 
take you away. I was too lively, and made protes- 
tation with anger against the indignities that they 
endeavored to press upon me. In those days I was 
Brahmin and proud man. Now I am dead man 
and eat ” — here he eyed the well-gnawed breast- 
bone with the first sign of emotion that I had seen 
in him since we met — “ crows, and other things. 
They took me from my sheets when they saw that 
I was too lively and gave me medicines for one 
week, and I survived successfully. Then they sent 
me by rail from my place to Okara Station, with a 
man to take care of me; and at Okara Station we 
met two other men, and they conducted we three 
on camels, in the night, from Okara Station to this 
place, and they propelled me from the top to the 
bottom, and the other two succeeded, and I have 
been here ever since two and a half years. Once 
I was Brahmin and proud man, and now I eat 
crows.” 

“ There is no way of getting out? ” 

“ None of what kind at all. When I first came I 
made experiments frequently and all the others 
also, but we have always succumbed to the sand 
which is precipitated upon our heads.” 

“ But surely,” I broke in at this point, “ the 
river-front is open, and it is worth while dodging 

the bullets; while at night ” 

I had already matured a rough plan of escape 
which a natural instinct of selfishness forbade me 
sharing with Gvtnga Dass. He, however, divined 




66 THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 

my unspoken thought almost as soon as it was 
formed; and, to my intense astonishment, gave 
vent to a long low chuckle of derision — the laugh- 
ter, be it understood, of a superior or at least of an 
equal. 

“ You will not ” — he had dropped the Sir com- 
pletely after his opening sentence — “ make any 
escape that way. But you can try. I have tried. 
Once only.” 

The sensation of nameless terror and abject fear 
which I had in vain attempted to strive against 
overmastered me completely. My long fast — it 
was now close upon ten o'clock, and I had eaten 
nothing since tiffin on the previous day — combined 
with the violent and unnatural agitation of the ride 
had exhausted me, and I verily believe that, for a 
few minutes, I acted as one mad. I hurled myself 
against the pitiless sand-slope. I ran round the 
base of the crater, blaspheming and praying by 
turns. I crawled out among the sedges of the 
river-front, only to be driven back each time in an 
agony of nervous dread by the rifle-bullets which 
cut up the sand round me — for I dared not face the 
death of a mad dog among that hideous crowd — 
and finally fell, spent and raving, at the curb of the 
well. No one had taken the slightest notice of an 
exhibition which makes me blush hotly even when 
I think of it now. 

Two or three men trod on my panting body as 
they drew water, but they were evidently used to 
this sort of thing, and had no time to waste upon 


THE STRANGE RIDE ©F MORRGWBIE JUKES. 67 

me. The situation was humiliating. Gunga Dass, 
indeed, when he had banked the embers of his fire 
with sand, was at some pains to throw half a cup- 
ful of fetid water over my head, an attention for 
which I could have fallen on my knees and thanked 
him, but he was laughing all the while in the same 
mirthless, wheezy key that greeted me on my first 
attempt to force the shoals. And so, in a semi- 
comatose condition, I lay till noon. Then, being 
only a man after all, I felt hungry, and intimated as 
* much to Gunga Dass, whom I had begun to regard 
as my natural protector. Following the impulse 
of the outer world when dealing with natives, I put 
my hand into my pocket and drew out four annas. 
The absurdity of the gift struck me at once, and I 
was about to replace the money. 

Gunga Dass, however, was of a different opinion. 
“ Give me the money,” said he; “ all you have, or I 
will get help, and we will kill you! ” All this as if 
it were the most natural thing in the world! 

A Briton's first impulse, I believe, is to guard the 
contents of his pockets; but a moment’s reflection 
convinced me of the futility of differing with the 
one man who had it in his power to make me com- 
fortable; and with whose help it was possible that I 
might eventually escape from the crater. I gave 
him all the money in my possession, Rs. 9~ r -5 — 
nine rupees eight annas and five pie — for I always 
keep small change as bakshish when I am in camp. 
Gunga Dass clutched the coins, and hid them at 
once in his ragged loin-cloth, his expression charxg- 


68 THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 

in g to something diabolical as he looked round to 
assure himself that no one had observed us. 

“ Now I will give you something to eat,” said he. 

What pleasure the possession of my money could 
have afforded him I am unable to say; but inas- 
much as it did give him evident delight I was not 
sorry that I had parted with it so readily, for I had 
no doubt that he would have had me killed if I had 
refused. One does not protest against the vaga- 
ries of a den of wild beasts; and my companions 
were lower than any beasts. While I devoured 
what Gunga Dass had provided, a coarse chapatti 
and a cupful of the foul well-water, the people 
showed not the faintest sign of curiosity — that 
curiosity which is so rampant, as a rule, in an In- 
dian village. 

I could even fancy that they despised me. At 
all events they treated me with the most chilling in- 
difference, and Gunga Dass was nearly as bad. I 
plied him with questions about the terrible village, 
and received extremely unsatisfactory answers. 
So far as I could gather, it had been in existence 
from time immemoria, -whence I concluded that 
it was at least a century i\d — and during that time 
no one had ever been known to escape from it. [I 
had u o control myself here with both hands, lest the 
blinc terror should lay hold of me a second time 
and drive me raving round the crater.] Gunga 
Dass took sl malicious pleasure in emphasizing this 
point and in watching me wince. Nothing that X 


THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 69 

Could do would induce him to tell me who the mys- 
terious “ They " were. 

“ It is so ordered/' he would reply, “ and I do 
not yet know anyone who has disobeyed the 
orders." 

“ Only wait till my servants find that I am miss- 
ing," I retorted, “ and I promise you that this 
place shall be cleared off the face of the earth, and 
I'll give you a lesson in civility, too, my friend." 

“ Your servants would be torn in pieces before 
they came near this place; and, besides, you are 
dead, my dear friend. It is not your fault, of 
course, but none the less you are dead and buried." 

At irregular intervals supplies of food, I was told, 
were dropped down from the land side into the 
amphitheater, and the inhabitants fought for them 
like wild beasts. When a man felt his death com- 
ing on he retreated to his lair and died there. The 
body was sometimes dragged out of the hole and 
thrown on to the sand, or allowed to rot where it 
lay. 

The phrase “ thrown on to the sand " caught my 
attention, and I asked Gunga Dass whether this 
sort of thing was not likely to breed a pestilence. 

“ That," said he, with another of his wheezy 
chuckles, “ you may see for yourself subsequently. 
You will have much time to make observations." 

Whereat, to his great delight, I winced once 
more and hastily continued the conversation: 
“ And how do you live here from day to day? 


?6 THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 

What do you do? ” The question elicited exactly 
the same answer as before — coupled with the infor- 
mation i.hat this place is like your European 
heaven; there is neither marrying nor giving in 
marriage.” 

Gunga Dass had been educated at a Mission 
School, and, as he himself admitted, had he only 
changed his religion “ like a wise man,” might have 
avoided the living grave which was now his por- 
tion. But, as long as I was with him, I fancy he 
was happy. 

Here was a Sahib, a representative of the domi- 
nant race, helpless as a child and completely at the 
mercy of his native neighbors. In a deliberate, lazy 
way he set himself to torture me as a schoolboy 
would devote a rapturous half-hour to watching 
the agonies of an impaled beetle, or as a ferret in a 
blind burrow might glue himself comfortably to 
the neck of a rabbit, d he burden of his conversa- 
tion was that there was no escape “ of no kind 
whatever,” and that I should stay here till I died 
and was thrown on to the sand.” If it were pos- 
sible to forejudge the conversation of the Damned 
on the advent of a new soul in their abode, I should 
say that they would speak as Gunga Dass did to 
me throughout that long afternoon. I was power- 
less to protest or answer; all my energies being de- 
voted to a struggle against the inexplicable terror 
that threatened to overwhelm me again and again. 

I can compare the feeling to nothing except the 
Struggles of a man against the overpowering 


THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. JI 

nausea of the Channel passage — only my agony 
was of the spirit and infinitely more terrible. 

As the day wore on, the inhabitants began to 
appear in full strength to catch the rays of the after- 
noon sun, which were now sloping in at the mouth 
of the crater. They assembled in little knots, and 
talked among themselves without even throwing a 
glance in my direction. About four o’clock, as far 
as I could judge, Gunga Dass rose and dived into 
his lair for a moment, emerging with a live crow in 
his hands. The wretched bird was in a most 
draggled and deplorable condition, but seemed to 
be in no way afraid of its master. Advancing cau- 
tiously to the river-front, Gunga Dass stepped from 
tussock to tussock until he had reached a smooth 
patch of sand directly in the line of the boat’s fire. 
The occupants of the boat took no notice. Here 
he stopped, and, with a couple of dexterous turns 
of the wrist, pegged the bird on its back with out- 
stretched wings. As was only natural, the crow 
began to shriek at once and beat the air with its 
claws. In a few seconds the clamor had attracted 
the attention of a bevy of wild crows on a shoal a 
few hundred yards away, where they were discuss- 
ing something that looked like a corpse. Half a 
dozen crows flew over at once to see what was 
going on, and also, as it proved, to attack the pin- 
ioned bird. Gunga Dass, who had lain down on a 
tussock, motioned to me to be quiet, though I 
fancy this was a needless precaution. In a mo- 
ment, and before I could see how it happened, a 


p THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES, 

wild crow, who had grappled with the shrieking 
and helpless bird, was entangled in the latter's 
claws, swiftly disengaged by Gunga Dass, and 
pegged down beside its companion in adversity. 
Curiosity, it seemed, overpowered the rest of the 
flock, and almost before Gunga Dass and I had 
time to withdraw to the tussock, two more captives 
were struggling in the upturned claws of the de- 
coys. So the chase — if I can give it so dignified a 
name — continued until Gunga Dass had captured 
seven crows. Five of them he throttled at once, 
reserving two for further operations another day. 
I was a good deal impressed by this, to me, novel 
method of securing food, and complimented Gunga 
Dass on his skill. 

“ It is nothing to do,” said he. “ To-morrow 
you must do it for me. You are stronger than I 

_ y> 

am. 

This calm asumption of superiority upset me not 
a little, and I answered peremtorily: “ Indeed, 
you old ruffian ! What do you think I have given 
you money for? ” 

“ Very well,” was the unmoved reply. u Per-» 
haps not to-morrow, nor the day after, nor subset 
quently; but in the end, and for many years, you 
will catch crows and eat crows, and you will thank 
your European God that you have crows to catch 
and eat.” 

I could have cheerfully strangled him for this; 
but judged it best under the circumstances to 
smother my resentment. An hour later I was eat- 


THE STRANGE RlDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 

ing one of the crows ; and, as Gunga Dass had said, 
thanking my God that I had a crow to eat. Never, 
as long as I live, shall I forget that evening meal. 
The whole population were squatting on the hard 
sand platform opposite their dens, huddled over 
tiny fires of refuse and dried rushes. Death, hav- 
ing once laid his hand upon these men and forborne 
to strike, seemed to stand aloof from them now; 
for most of our company were old men, bent and 
worn and twisted with years, and women aged to 
all appearance as the Fates themselves. They sat 
together in knots and talked — God only knows 
Hvhat they found to discuss — in low, equable tones, 
curiously in contrast to the strident babble with 
which natives are accustomed to make day hideous. 
Now and then an access of that sudden fury which 
had possessed me in the morning would lay hold 
on a man or woman; and with yells and impreca- 
tions the sufferer would attack the steep slope until, 
baffled and bleeding, he fell back on the platform 
incapable of moving a limb. The others would 
never even raise their eyes when this happened, as 
men too well aware of the futility of their fellows’ 
attempts and wearied with their useless repetition. 
I saw four such outbursts in the .course of that 
evening. 

Gunga Dass took an eminently business-like 
view of my situation, and while we were dining — I 
can afford to laugh at the recollection now, but it 
was painful enough at the time — propounded the 
terms on which he would consent to “ do ” for rtf* 


74 the strange ride of morrowbie jukes. 

My nine rupees eight annas, he argued, at the rate 
of three annas a day, would provide me with food 
for fifty-one days, or about seven weeks; that is to 
say, he would be willing to cater for me for that 
length of time. At the end of it I was to look after 
myself. For a further consideration — videlicet, my 
boots — he would be willing to allow me to occupy 
the den next to his own, and would supply me with 
as much dried grass for bedding as he could spare. 

“ Very well, Gunga Dass,” I replied; “ to the 
first terms I cheerfully agree, but, as there is noth- 
ing on earth to prevent my killing you as you sit 
here and taking everything that you have ” (I 
thought of the two invaluable crows at the time), 
“ I flatly refuse to give you my boots and shall take 
whichever den I please.” 

The stroke was a bold one, and I was glad when 
I saw that it had succeeded. Gunga Dass changed 
his tone immediately, and disavowed all intention 
of asking for my boots. At the time it did not 
strike me as at all strange that I, a Civil Engineer, 
a man of thirteen years’ standing in the Service, 
and I trust, an average Englishman, should thus 
calmly threaten murder and violence against the 
man who had, for a consideration it is true, taken 
me under his wing. I had left the world, it 
seemed, for centuries. I was as certain then as I 
am now of my own existence, that in the accursed 
settlement there was no law save that of the strong- 
est; that the living dead men had thrown behind 
them every canon of the world which had cast therm 


THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBlE JUKES. ?g 

out; and that I had to depend for my own life on 
my strength and vigilance alone. The crew of the 
ill-fated Mignonette are the only men who would 
understand my frame of mind. “ At present,” I 
argued to myself, “ I am strong and a match for six 
of^these wretches. It is imperatively necessary 
that I should, for my own sake, keep both health 
and strength until the hour of my release comes — 
if it ever does.” 

Fortified with these resolutions, I ate and drank 
as much as I could, and made Gunga Dass under- 
stand that I intended to be his master, and that the 
least sign of insubordination on his part would be 
visited with the only punishment I had it in my 
power to inflict — sudden and violent death. 
Shortly after this I went to bed. That is to say, 
Gunga Dass gave me a double armful of dried 
bents, which I thrust down the mouth of the lair to 
the right of his, and followed myself, feet foremost; 
the hole running about nine fee^mto the sand with 
a slight downward inclination, and being neatly 
shored with timbers. From my den, which faced 
the river-front, I was able to watch the waters of 
the Sutlej flowing past under the light of a young 
moon and compose myself to sleep as best I might. 

The horrors of that night I shall never forget. 
My den was nearly as narrow as a coffin, and the 
sides had been worn smooth and greasy by the 
contact of innumerable naked bodies, added to 
which it smelled abominably. Sleep was alto- 
gether out of question to one in my excited frame 


<]6 THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 

of mind. As the night wore on, it seemed that the 
entire amphitheater was filled with legions of un- 
clean devils that, trooping up from the shoals be- 
low, mocked the unfortunates in their lairs. 

Personally I am not of an imaginative tempera- 
ment, — very few Engineers are, — but on that occa- 
sion I was as completely prostrated with nervous 
terror as any woman. After half an hour or so, 
however, I was able once more to calmly review 
my chances of escape. Any exit by the steep sand 
walls was, of course, impracticable. I had been 
thoroughly convinced of this some time before. It 
was possible, just possible, that I might, in the un- 
certain moonlight, safely run the gauntlet of the 
rifle shots. The place was so full of terror for me 
that I was prepared to undergo any risk in leaving 
it. Imagine my delight, then, when, after creep- 
ing stealthily to the river-front, I found that the in- 
fernal boat was not there. My freedom lay before 
me in the next few steps! 

By walking out to the first shallow pool that lay 
at the foot of the projecting left horn of the horse- 
shoe, I could wade across, turn the flank of the 
crater, and make my way inland. Without a mo- 
ment’s hesitation I marched briskly past the tus- 
socks where Gunga Dass had snared the crows, and 
out in the direction of the smooth white sand be- 
yond. My first step from the tufts of dried grass 
showed me how utterly futile was any hope of es- 
cape; for, as I put my foot down, I felt an inde- 
scribable drawing, sucking motion of the sand 


THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 

below. Another moment and my leg was swal- 
lowed up nearly to the knee. In the moonlight 
the whole surface of the sand seemed to be shaken 
with devilish delight at my disappointment. I 
struggled clear, sweatin g with terror and exertion, 
back to the tussocks behind me and fell on my face. 

My only means of escape from the semicircle was 
protected with a quicksand! 

How long I lay I have not the faintest idea; but 
I was roused at last by the malevolent chuckle of 
Gunga Dass at my ear. “ I would advise you, 
Protector of the Poor ” (the ruffian was speaking 
English) “ to return to your house. It is un- 
healthy to lie down here. Moreover, when the 
boat returns, you will most certainly be rifled at.” 
He stood over me in the dim light of the dawn, 
chuckling and laughing to himself. Suppressing 
my first impulse to catch the man by the neck and 
throw him on to the quicksand, I rose sullenly and 
followed him to the platform below the burrows. 

Suddenly, and futilely as I thought while I 
spoke, I asked : “ Gunga Dass, what is the good of 
the boat if I can’t get out anyhow? ” I recollect 
that even in my deepest trouble I had been specu- 
lating vaguely on the waste of ammunition in 
guarding an already well protected foreshore. 

Gunga Dass laughed again and made answer: 
" They have the boat only in daytime. It is for 
the reason that there is a way. I hope we shall 
have the pleasure of your company for much 
longer time. It is a pleasant spot when you have 


?8 THE STRANGE RIDE GF MORRGWBIE JUKES. 

been here some years and eaten roast crow long 
enough.” 

I staggered, numbed and helpless, toward the 
fetid burrow allotted to me, and fell asleep. An 
hour or so later I was awakened by a piercing 
scream — the shrill, high-pitched scream of a horse 
in pain. Those who have once heard that will 
never forget the sound. I found some little diffi- 
culty in scrambling out of the burrow. When I 
was in the open, I saw Pornic, my poor old Pomic, 
lying dead on the sandy soil. How they had killed 
him I cannot guess. Gunga Dass explained that 
horse was better than crow, and “ greatest good of 
greatest number is political maxim. We are now 
Republic, Mister Jukes, and you are entitled to a 
fair share of the beast. If you like, we will pass a 
vote of thanks. Shall I propose? ” 

Yes, we were a Republic indeed! A Republic 
of wild beasts penned at the bottom of a pit, to eat 
and fight and sleep till we died. I attempted no 
protest of any kind, but sat down and stared at the 
hideous sight in front of me. In less time almost 
than it takes me to write this, Pornic’s body was 
divided, in some unclean way or other; the men 
and women had dragged the fragments on to the 
platform and were preparing their morning meal. 
Gunga Dass cooked mine. The almost irresistible 
impulse to fly at the sand walls until I was wearied 
laid hold of me afresh, and I had to struggle against 
it with all my might. Gunga Dass was offensively 
jocular till I told him that, if he addressed another 


/ 


THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 79 

remark of any kind whatever to me, I should 
strangle him where he sat. This silenced him till 
silence became insupportable, and I bade him say 
something. 

“ Y ou will live here till you die like the other 
Feringhi,” he said coolly, watching me over the 
fragment of gristle that he was gnawing. 

“ What other Sahib, you swine? Speak at once, 
and don’t stop to tell me a lie.” 

“ He is over there,” answered Gunga Dass, 
pointing to a burrow-mouth about four doors to 
the left of my own. “You can see for yourself. 
He died in the burrow as you will die, and I will 
die, and as all these men and women and the one 
child will also die.” 

“ For pity’s sake tell me all you know about him. 
Who was he? When did he come, and when did 
he die? ” 

This appeal was a weak step on my part. Gunga 
Dass only leered and replied: “ I will not — unless 
you give me something first.” 

Then I recollected where I was, and struck the 
man between the eyes, partially stunning him. He 
stepped down from the platform at once, and, 
cringing and fawning and weeping and attempting 
to embrace my feet, led me round to the burrow 
which he had indicated. 

“ I know nothing whatever about the gentleman. 
Your God be my witness that I do not. He was 
as anxious to escape as you were, and he was shot 
from the boat; though we all did all things to pre- 


80 THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 

vent him from attempting. He was shot here.” 
Gunga Dass laid his hand on his lean stomach and 
bowed to the earth. 

“ Well, and what then? Goon!” 

“And then — and then, Your Honor, we carried 
him into his house and gave him water, and put 
wet cloths on the wound, and he laid down in his 
house and gave up the ghost.” 

“ In how long? In how long? ” 

“ About half an hour after he received his 
wound. I call Vishnu to witness,” yelled the ( 
wretched man, “ that I did everything for him. 
Everything which was possible, that I did! ” 

He threw himself down on the ground and 
clasped my ankles. But I had my doubts about 
Gunga Dass’ benevolence, and kicked him off as he 
lay protesting. 

“ I believe you robbed him of everything he had. 
But I can find out in a minute or two. How long 
was the Sahib here? ” 

“ Nearly a year and a half. I think he must have 
gone mad. But hear me swear, Protector of the 
Poor! Won’t Your Honor hear me swear that I 
never touched an article that belonged to him? 
What is Your Worship going to do? ” 

I had taken Gunga Dass by the waist and had 
hauled him on to the platform opposite the de- 
serted burrow. As I did so I thought of my 
wretched fellow-prisoner’s unspeakable misery 
among all these horrors for eighteen months, and 
the final agony of dying like a rat in a hole, with a 


THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWEIE JUKES. . 8l 

gullet-wound in the stomach. Gunga Dass fancied 
| was going to kill him and howled pitifully. The 
nst of the population, in the plethora that follow’s 
a full flesh meal, watched us without stirring. 

“ Go inside, Gunga Dass,” said I, “ and fetch it 
out.” 

I was feeling sick and faint with horror now. 
Gunga Dass nearly rolled off the platform and 
howled aloud. 

“ But I am Brahmin, Sahib — a high-caste Brah- 
min, By your soul, by your father’s soul, do not 
make me do this thing! ” 

“ Brahmin or no Brahmin, by my soul and my 
father's soul, in you go! ” I said, and, seizing him 
by the shoulders, I crammed his head into the 
mouth of the burrow, kicked the rest of him in, 
and, sitting down, covered my face with my hands. 

At the end of a few minutes I heard a rustle and 
a creak; then Gunga Dass in a sobbing, choking 
whisper speaking to himself; then a soft thud — and 
I uncovered my eyes. 

The dry sand had turned the corpse intrusted to 
its keeping into a yellow-brown mummy. I told 
Gunga Dass to stand off while I examined it. The 
body — clad in an olive-green hunting-suit much 
stained and worn, with leather pads on the shoul- 
ders — was that of a man between thirty and forty, 
above middle height, with light, sandy hair, long 
mustache, and a rough unkempt beard. The left 
canine of the upper jaw was missing, and a portion 
of the lobe of the right ear was gone. On the sec- , 


8a THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 

ond finger of the left hand was a ring — a shield- 
shaped bloodstone set in gold, with a monogram 
that might have been either “ B. K.” or “ B. L.” 
On the third finger of the right hand was a silver 
ring in the shape of a coiled cobra, much worn and 
tarnished. Gunga Dass deposited a handful of 
trifles he had picked out of the burrow at my feet, 
and, covering the face of the body with my hand- 
kerchief, I turned to examine these. I give the 
full list in the hope that it may lead to the identifi- 
cation of the unfortunate man: 

1. Bowl of a briarwood pipe, serrated at the 
edge; much worn and blackened; bound with 
String at the screw. 

2. Two patent-lever keys; wards of both broken. 

3. Tortoise-shell-handled penknife, silver or 
nickel, name-plate marked with monogram “B. K.” 

4. Envelope, post-mark undecipherable, bearing 
a Victorian stamp, addressed to “ Miss Mon — ” 
(rest illegible) — “ ham ” — “ nt.” 

5. Imitation crocodile-skin note-book with pen- 
cil. First forty-five pages blank; four and a half 
illegible; fifteen others filled with private memo- 
randa relating chiefly to three persons — a Mrs. L. 
Singleton, abbreviated several times to “ Lot 
Single/’ “ Mrs. S. May,” and “ Garmiston,” re- 
ferred to in places as “ Jerry ” or “ Jack.” 

6. Handle of a small-sized hunting-knife. Blade 
snapped short. Buck’s horn, diamond-cut, with 

{ swivel and ring on the butt; fragment of cotton 
* cord attached. 


THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUK£S. 83 

It must not be supposed that I inventoried all 
these things on the spot as fully as I have here writ- 
ten them down. The note-book first attracted my 
attention, and I put it in my pocket with a view to 
studying it later on. The rest of the articles I con- 
veyed to my burrow for safety’s sake, and there, 
being a methodical man, I inventoried them. I 
then returned to the corpse and ordered Gunga 
Dass to help me to carry it out to the river-front. 
While we were engaged in this, the exploded shell 
of an old brown cartridge dropped out of one of 
the pockets and rolled at my feet. Gunga Dass 
had not seen it; and I fell to thinking that a man 
does not carry exploded cartridge-cases, especially 
t<s browns,” which will not bear loading twice, about 
with him when shooting. In other w r ords, that 
cartridge-case had been fired inside the crater. 
Consequently there must be a gun somewhere. I 
was on the verge of asking Gunga Dass, but 
checked myself, knowing that he would lie. We 
laid the body down on the edge of the quicksand by 
the tussocks. It was my intention to push it out 
and let it be swallowed up — the only possible mode 
ot burial that I could think of. I ordered Gunga 
Dass to go away. 

Then I gingerly put the corpse out on the quick- 
sand. In doing so— it was lying face downward — 1 
tore the frail and rotten khaki shooting-coat open, 
disclosing a hideous cavity in the back. I have 
already told you that the dry sand had, as it were, 
mummified the body. A moment’s glance showed 


84 THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 

that the gaping hole had been caused by a gun-shot 
wound; the gun must have been fired with the 
muzzle almost touching the back. The shooting- 
coat, being intact, had been drawn over the body 
after death, which must have been instantaneous. 
The secret of the poor wretch's death was plain to 
me in a flash. Someone of the crater, presumably 
Gunga Dass, must have shot him with his own gun 
— the gun that fitted the brown cartridges. He 
had never attempted to escape in the face of the 
rifle-fire from the boat. 

I pushed the corpse out hastily, and saw it sink 
from sight literally in a few seconds. I shuddered 
as I watched. In a dazed, half-conscious way I 
turned to peruse The note-book. A stained and 
discolored slip of paper had been inserted between 
the binding and the back, and dropped out as I 
opened the pages. This is what it contained: 
“ Four out from crow-clump: three left; nine out; 
two right; three back; two left; fourteen out; two 
left; seven out; one left; nine back; two right; six 
back; four right; seven back." The paper had 
been burnt and charred at the edges. What it 
meant I could not understand. I sat down on the 
dried bents, turning it over and over between my 
fingers, until I was aware of Gunga Dass standing 
immediately behind me with glowing eyes and 
outstretched hands. 

“ Have you got it? ” he panted. “ Will you not 
let me look at it also? I swear that I will return 
it” 


ffife STRANGE RIDE OR MORROWBIE JUKES. 8$ 

“ Got what?. Return what? ” I asked. 

“ That which you have in your hands. It will 
help us both.” He stretched out his long, bird- 
like talons, trembling with eagerness. 

“ I could never find it,” he continued. “ He 
had secreted it about his person. Therefore I shot 
him, but neveftheless I was unable to obtain it.” 

Gunga Dass had quite forgotten his little fiction 
about the rifle-bullet. I received the information 
perfectly calmly. Morality is blunted by consort- 
ing with the Dead who are alive. 

“ What on earth are you raving about? What 
is it you want me to give you? ” 

“ The piece of paper in the note-book. It will 
help us both. Oh, you fool! You fool! Can 
you not see what it will do for us? We shall 
escape! ” 

His voice rose almost to a scream, and he danced 
with excitement before me. I own I was moved 
at the chance of getting aw r ay. 

“ Don’t skip! Explain yourself. Do you mean 
to say that this slip of paper will help us? What 
does it mean? ” 

“ Read it aloud! Read it aloud! I beg and I 
pray to you to read it aloud.” 

I did so. Gung’a Dass listened delightedly, and 
drew an irregular line in thg sand wfith his fingers. 

“ See now! It w r as the length of his gun-barrels 
without the stock. I have those barrels. Four 
gun-barrels out from the place where I caught 
crows. Straight out; do you follow me? Then 


THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JU&E&. 

three left — Ah! how well I remember when that 
man worked it out night after night. Then nine 
out, and so on. Out is always straight before you 
across the quicksand. He told me so before I 
killed him.” 

“ But if you knew all this why didn't you get out 
before? ” 

“ I did not know it. He told me that he was 
working it out a year and a half ago, and how he 
was working it out night after night when the boat 
had gone away, and he could get out near the 
quicksand safely. Then he said that we would get 
away together. But I was afraid that he would 
leave me behind one night when he had worked it 
all out, and so I shot him. Besides, it is not ad- 
visable that the men who once get in here should 
escape. Only I, and I am a Brahmin.” 

The prospect of escape had brought Gunga 
Dass' caste back to him. He stood up, walked 
about, and gesticulated violently. Eventually I 
managed to make him talk soberly, and he told me 
how this Englishman had spent six months night 
after night in exploring, inch by inch, the passage 
across the quicksand; how he had declared it to be 
simplicity itself up to within about twenty yards of 
the river bank after turning the flank of the left 
horn of the horseshoe. This much he had evi- 
dently not completed when Gunga Dass shot him 
with his own gun. 

In my frenzy of delight at the possibilities of 
escape I recollect shaking hands effusively with 


WHS StRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES. 87 

Gunga Dass, after we had decided that we were to 
make an attempt to get away that very night. It 
was weary work waiting throughout the afternoon. 

About ten o’clock, as far as I could judge, when 
the moon had just risen above the lip of the crater, 
Gunga Dass made a move for his burrow to bring 
out the gun-barrels whereby to measure our path. 
All the other wretched inhabitants had retired to 
their lairs long ago. The guardian boat drifted 
downstream some hours before, and we were 
utterly alone by the crow-clump. Gunga Dass, 
while carrying the gun-barrels, let slip the piece of 
paper which was to be our guide. I stooped down 
hastily to recover it, and, as I did so, I was aware 
that the diabolical Brahmin was aiming a violent 
blow at the back of my head with the gun-barrels. 
It was too late to turn round. I must have re- 
ceived the blow somewhere on the nape of my 
neck. A hundred thousand fiery stars danced be- 
fore my eyes, and I fell forward senseless at the 
edge of the quicksand. 

When I recovered consciousness, the moon was 
going down, and I was sensible of intolerable pain 
in the back of my head. Gunga Dass had disap- 
peared and my mouth was full of blood. I lay 
down again and prayed that I might die without 
more ado. Then the unreasoning fury which I 
have before mentioned laid hold upon me, and I 
staggered inland toward the walls of the crater. It 
seemed that someone was calling to me in a whis- 
per— a Sahib! Sahib! Sahib! ” exactly as my 


88 THE STRANGE RIDE OF kORRO^BlE JUKES. 

bearer used to call me in the mornings. I fancied 
that I was delirious until a handful of sand fell a* 
my feet. Then I looked up and saw a head peer- 
ing down into the amphitheater — the head of Dun- 
noo, my dog-boy, who attended to my collies. As 
soon as he had attracted my attention, he held up 
his hand and showed a rope. I motioned, stagger- 
ing to and fro the while, that he should throw it 
down. It was a couple of leather punkah-ropes 
knotted together, with a loop at one end. I 
slipped the loop over my head and under my arms; 
heard Dunnoo urge something forward; was com 
scious that I was being dragged, face downward, 
up the steep sand slope, and the next instant found 
myself choked and half fainting on the sandhills 
overlooking the crater. Dunnoo, with his face 
ashy gray in the moonlight, implored me not to 
stay but to get back to my tent at once. 

It seems that he had tracked Pornic’s footprints 
fourteen miles across the sands to the crater; had 
returned and told my servants, who flatly refused 
to meddle with anyone, white or black, once fallen 
into the hideous Village of the Dead; whereupon 
Dunnoo had taken one of my ponies and a couple 
of punkah ropes, returned to the crater, and hauled 
me out as I have described. 

To cut a long story short, Dunnoo is now my 
personal servant on a gold mohur a month — a sum 
which I still think far too little for the services he 
has rendered. Nothing on earth will induce me to 
go near that devilish spot again* or to reveal its 





$HE StRAkGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JtffcES. #9 

whereabouts more clearly than I have done. Of 
Gunga Dass I have never tbund a trace, nor do I 
wish to do. My sole motive in giving this to be 
published is the hope that someone may possibly 
identify, from the details and the inventory which 
I have given above, the corpse of the man in the 
olive-green hunting-suit. 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 

Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found worthy. 

The Law, as quoted, lays down a fair conduct of 
life, and one not easy to follow. I have been fel- 
low to a beggar again and again under circum- 
stances which prevented either of us finding out 
whether the other was worthy. I have still to be 
brother to a Prince, though I once came near to 
kinship with what might have been a veritable 
King and was promised the reversion of a King- 
dom — army, law-courts, revenue, and policy all 
complete. But, to-day, I greatly fear that my 
King is dead, and if I want a crown I must go and 
hunt it for myself. 

The beginning of everything was in a railway 
train upon the road to Mhow from Ajmir. There 
had been a Deficit in the Budget, which necessi- 
tated traveling, not Second-class, which is only half 
as dear as First-class, but by Intermediate, which is 
very awful indeed. There are no cushions in the 
Intermediate class, and the population are either 
Intermediate, which is Eurasian, or native, which 
for a long night journey is nasty, or Loafer, which 
is amusing though intoxicated. Intermediates do 
not patronize refreshment-rooms. They carry 


fHE MAtt WHO ’WOULD BB KINO. gS 

their food in bundles and pots, and buy sweets from 
the native sweetmeat-sellers, and drink the roadside 
water. That is why in the hot weather Inter- 
mediates are taken out of the carriages dead, and 
in all weathers are most properly looked down 
upon. 

My particular Intermediate happened to be 
empty till I reached Nasirabad, when a huge gen- 
tleman in shirt-sleeves entered, and, following the 
custom of Intermediates, passed the time of day. 
He was a wanderer and a vagabond like myself, but 
with an educated taste for whisky. He told tales 
of things he had seen and done, of out-of-the-way 
corners of the Empire into which he had pene- 
trated, and of adventures in which he risked his life 
for a few days’ food. “ If India was filled with men 
like you and me, not knowing more than the crows 
where they’d get their next day’s rations, it isn’t 
seventy millions of revenue the land would be pay- 
ing — it’s seven hundred millions,” said he; and as 
I looked at his mouth and chin I was disposed to 
agree with him. We talked politics — the politics 
of Loaferdom that sees things from the underside 
where the lath and plaster are not smoothed off — 
and we talked postal arrangements because my 
friend wanted to send a telegram back from the 
next station to Ajmir, which is the turning-off 
place from the Bombay to the Mhow line as you 
travel westward. My friend had no money be- 
yond eight annas which he wanted for dinner, and 
I had no money at all, owing to the hitch in the 


§58 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KINO. 


Budget before mentioned. Further, I was going 
into a wilderness where, though I should resume 
touch with the Treasury, there were no telegraph 
offices. I was, therefore, unable to help him in 
any way. 

“We might threaten a Station-master, and make 
him send a wire on tick,” said my friend, “ but 
that d mean inquiries for you and for me, and I’ve 
got my hands full these days. Did you say you 

ar uVfjf ? ng back alon §' this line within any days?” 

“ Within ten,” I said. ' 

“ Can’t you make it eight? ” said he. “ Mine is 
rather urgent business.” 

“ I can send your telegram within ten days if 
that will serve you,” I said. 

“ } couldn’t trust the wire to fetch him now I 
think of it. It s this way. He leaves Delhi on the 
f, 3 d f °[ ?? mba y- Tli at means he’ll be running 
through Ajmir about the night of the 23d.” 

“ But I’m going into the Indian Desert,” I ex- 
plained. 

. “ a n<i good,” said he. “ You’ll be chang- 
ing at Marwar Junction to get into Jodhpore terri- 
tory— you must do that— and he’ll be coming 
through Marwar Junction in the early morning of 
the 24th by the Bombay Mail. Can you be at 
Marwar Junction on that time? ’Twon’t be incon- 
veniencing you because I know that there’s pre- 
cious few pickings to be got out of these Central 
India States — even though you pretend to be cor- 
respondent of the Backwoodsman.” 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 93 

« Have you ever tried that trick? ” I asked. 

“ Again and again, but the Residents find you 
out, and tbcn you get escorted to the Border be- 
fore you’ve time to get your knife into them. But 
about my friend here. I must give him a word o 
mouth to tell him what’s come to me or else he 
won’t know where to go. I would take it more 
than kind of you if you was to come out of Central 
India in time to catch him at Marwar Junction, and 
say to him: ‘He has gone South for the week 
He’ll know what that means. He’s a big man with 
a red beard, and a great swell he is. You’ll find 
him sleeping like a gentleman with all his luggage 
round him in a Second-class compartment. But 
don’t you be afraid. Slip down the window, and 
say: ‘ He has gone South for the week,’ and he ll 
tumble. It’s only cutting your time of stay in 
those parts by two days. I ask you as a strange? 
— going to the West,” he said with emphasis. 

“ Where have you come from? ” said I. 

“ From the East,” said he, and I am hoping 
that you will give him the message on the Square 
for the sake of my Mother as well as your own. 

Englishmen are not usually softened by appeals 
to the memory of their mothers, but for certain 
reasons, which will be fully apparent, I saw fit to 

ctSTTCC. 

“ It’s more than a little matter,” said he, “ and 
that’s why I ask you to do it— and now I know that 
I can depend on you doing it. A Second-class car- 
riage at Marwar Junction, and a red-haired man 


£4 THE man who woulb be king. 

asleep in it. You’ll be sure to remember. I gti 
out at the next station, and I must hold on there 
till he comes or sends me what I want.” 

“ I’ll give the message if I catch him,” I said, 
“ and for the sake of your Mother as well as mine 
I’ll give you a word of advice. Don’t try to run 
the Central India States just now as the corre- 
spondent of the Backwoodsman. There’s a real 
one knocking about here, and it might lead to 
trouble.” 

“Thank you,” said he simply, “and when will 
the swine be gone? I can’t starve because he’s 
ruining my work. I wanted to get hold of the De- 
gumber Rajah down here about his father’s widow, 
and give him a jump.” 

“ What did he do to his father’s widow, then? ” 

“ Filled her up with red pepper and slippered her 
to death as she hung from a beam. I found that 
out myself and I’m the only man that would dare 
going into the State to get hush-money for it. 
They’ll try to poison me, same as they did in Chor- 
tumna when I went on the loot there. But you’ll 
give the man at Marwar Junction my message? ” 

He got out at a little roadside station, and I re- 
flected. I had heard, more than once, of men per- 
sonating correspondents of newspapers and bleed- 
ing small Native States with threats of exposure, 
but I had never met any of the caste before. They 
lead a hard life, and generally die with great sud- 
denness. The Native States have a wholesome 
horror of English newspapers, which may throw. 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 95 

light on their peculiar methods of government, and 
do their best to choke correspondents with cham- 
pagne, or drive them out of their mind with four- 
in-hand barouches. They do not understand that 
nobody cares a straw for the internal administra- 
tion of Native States so long as oppression and 
crime are kept within decent limits, and the ruler 
is not drugged, drunk, or diseased from one end of 
the year to the other. Native States were created 
“by Providence in order to supply picturesque 
scenery, tigers, and tall-writing. They are the 
dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable 
cruelty, touching the Railway and the Telegraph 
on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun- 
al-Raschid. When I left the train I did business 
with divers Kings, and in eight days passed 
through many changes of life. Sometimes I wore 
dress-clothes and consorted with Princes and Po- 
liticals, drinking from crystal and eating from 
silver. Sometimes I lay out upon the ground and 
devoured what I could get, from a plate made of a 
flapjack, and drank the running water, and slept 
under the same rug as my servant. It was all in 
the day’s work. 

Then I headed for the Great Indian Desert upon 
the proper date, as I had promised, and the night 
Mail set me down at Marwar Junction, where a 
funny little happy-go-lucky, native-managed rail- 
way runs to Jodhpore. The Bombay Mail from 
Delhi makes a short halt at Marwar. She arrived 
as I got in, and I had just time to hurry to her plat- 


96 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 

form and go down the carriages. There was only 
one Second-class on the train. I slipped the win- 
dow and looked down upon a flaming red beard, 
half covered by a railway rug. That was my man, 
fast asleep, and I dug him gently in the ribs. He 
woke with a grunt and I saw his face in the light of 
the lamps. It was a great and shining face. f 

“ Tickets again? ” said he. 

“ No,” said I. “ I am to tell you that he is gone 
South for the week. He is gone South for the 
week! ” 

The train had begun to move out. The red man 
rubbed his eyes. “ He has gone South for the 
week! ” he repeated. “ Now that’s just like his 
impidence. Did he say that I was to give you any- 
thing? ’Cause I won’t.” 

“ He didn’t,” I said and dropped away, and 
watched the red lights die out in the dark. It was 
horribly cold because the wind was blowing off the 
sands. I climbed into my own train — not an 
Intermediate Carriage this time — and went to 
sleep. 

If the man with the beard had given me a rupee 
I should have kept it as a memento of a rather 
curious affair. But the consciousness of having 
done my duty was my only reward. 

Later on I reflected that two gentlemen like my 
friends could not do any good if they foregathered 
and personated correspondents of newspapers, and 
might, if they “ stuck up ” one of the little rat-trap 
states of Central India or Southern Rajputana, get 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 97 

themselves into serious difficulties. I therefore 
took some trouble to describe them as accurately 
as I could remember to people who would be inter- 
ested in deporting them: and succeeded, so I was 
later informed, in having them headed back from 
the Degumber borders. 

Then I became respectable, and returned to air 
Office where there were no Kings and no incidents 
except the daily manufacture of a newspaper. A 
newspaper office seems to attract every conceivable 
sort of person, to the prejudice of discipline. 
Zenana-mission ladies arrive, and beg that the Edi- 
tor will instantly abandon all his duties to describe 
a Christian prize-giving in a back-slum of a per- 
fectly inaccessible village; Colonels who have been 
overpassed for commands sit down and sketch the 
outline of a series of ten, twelve, or twenty-four 
leading articles on Seniority versus Selection ; mis- 
sionaries wish to know why they have not been 
permitted to escape from their regular vehicles of 
abuse and swear at a brother-missionary under 
'special patronage of the editorial We; stranded 
theatrical companies troop up to explain that they 
'cannot pay for their advertisements, but on their 
return from New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with - 
interest; inventors of patent punkah-pulling ma-j 
chines, carriage couplings, and unbreakable swords 
and axle-trees call with specifications in their 
pockets and hours at their disposal ; tea-companies 
enter and elaborate their prospectuses with the 
office pens; secretaries of ball-committees clamor 


Q$ THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 

to have the glories of their last dance more fully 
expounded; strange ladies rustle in and say: “I 
want a hundred lady’s cards printed at once, 
please,” which is manifestly part of an Editor’s 
duty; and every dissolute ruffian that ever tramped 
the Grand Trunk Road makes it his business to ask 
for employment as a proof-reader. And, all the 
time, the telephone-bell is ringing madly, and 
Kings are being killed on the Continent, and Em- 
pires are saying — “ You’re another,” and Mister 
Gladstone is calling down brimstone upon the 
British Dominions, and the little black copy-boys 
are whining, “ kaa-pi chay-ha-yeh ” (copy wanted), 
like tired bees and most of the paper is as blank as 
Modred’s shield. 

But that is the amusing part of the year. There 
are other six months wherein none ever come to 
call, and the thermometer walks inch by inch up to 
the top of the glass, and the office is darkened to 
just above reading-light, and the press machines 
are red-hot of touch, and nobody writes anything 
but accounts of amusements in the Hill-stations or 
obituary notices. Then the telephone becomes a 
tinkling terror, because it tells you of the sudden 
deaths of men and women that you knew inti- 
mately, and the prickly-heat covers you as with a 
garment, and you sit down and write: “A slight 
increase of sickness is reported from, the Khuda 
Janta Khan District. The outbreak is purely spo- 
radic in its nature, and, thanks to the energetic 
efforts of the District authorities, is now almost at 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. $9 

an end. It is, however, with deep regret we record 
the death, etc.” 

Then the sickness really breaks out, and the less 
recording and reporting the better for the peace of 
the subscribers. But the Empires and the Kings 
continue to divert themselves as selfishly as before, 
and the Foreman thinks that a daily paper really 
ought to come out once in twenty-four hours, and 
all the people at the Hill-stations in the middle oi 
their amusements say: “ Good gracious! Why 
can’t the paper be sparkling? I’m sure there’s 
plenty going on up here.” 

That is the dark half of the moon, and, as the 
advertisements say, “ must be experienced to be 
appreciated.” 

It was in that season, and a remarkably evil sea- 
son, that the paper began running the last issue of 
the week on Saturday night, which is to say Sun- 
day morning, after the custom of a London paper. 
This was a great convenience, for immediately aftet 
the paper was put to bed, the dawn would lowef 
the thermometer from 96° to almost 84° for half an 
hour, and in that chill — you have no idea how cold 
is 84° on the glass until you begin to pray for it — ■ 
a very tired man could set off to sleep ere the heat 
roused him. 

One Saturday night it was my pleasant duty to 
put the paper to bed alone. A King or courtier or 
a courtesan or a community was going to die or 
get a new Constitution, or do something that was 
important on the other side of the world, and the 


I DO 


THE MAN WHO WOULB BE KING. 


paper was to be held open till the latest possible 
minute in order to catch the telegram. It was a 
pitchy black night, as stifling as a June night can 
be, and the loo, the red-hot wind from the west- 
ward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees and 
pretending that the rain was on its heels. Now 
and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall 
on the dust with the flop of a frog, but all our 
weary world knew that was only pretense. It was 
a shade cooler in the press-room than the office, 
so I sat there, while the type ticked and clicked, 
and the night-jars hooted at the windows, and the 
all but naked compositors wiped the sweat from 
their foreheads and called for water. The thing 
that was keeping us back, whatever it was, would 
not come off, though the loo dropped and the last 
type was set, and the whole round earth stood still 
in the choking heat, with its finger on its lip, to wait 
the event. I drowsed, and wondered whether the 
telegraph was a blessing, and whether this dying 
man, or struggling people, was aware of the incon- 
venience the delay was causing. There was no 
special reason beyond the heat and worry to make 
tension, but as the clock-hands crept up to three 
o’clock and the machines spun their fly-wheels two 
or three times to see that all was in order, before I 
said the word that would set them off, I could have 
shrieked aloud. 

Then the roar and rattle of the wheels shivered 
the quiet into little bits. I rose to go- away, but 
two men in white clothes stood in front of me. 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. iQt 

The first one said: “ It’s him! ” The second said: 
“ So it is! ” And they both laughed almost as 
loudly as the machinery roared, and mopped their 
foreheads. “ We see there was a light burning 
across the road and we were sleeping in that ditch 
there for coolness, and I said to my friend here, 
The office is open. Let’s come along and speak 
to him as turned us back from the Degumber 
State,” said the smaller of the two. He was the 
man I had met in the Mhow train, and his fellow 
was the red-bearded man of Marwar Junction. 
There was no mistaking the eyebrows of the one or 
the beard of the other. 

I was not pleased, because I wished to go to 
sleep, not to- squabble with loafers. “ What do 
you want? ” I asked. 

“ Half an hour’s talk with you cool and com- 
fortable, in the office,” said the red-bearded man, 
“ We’d like some drink — the Contrack doesn’t be- 
gin yet, Peachey, so you needn’t look — but what 
we really want is advice. We don’t want money. 

. We ask you as a favor, because you did us a bad 
turn about Degumber.” 

I led from the press-room to the stifling office 
with the maps on the walls, and the red-haired man 
rubbed his hands. “ That’s something like,” said 
he. “ This was the proper shop to come to. 
Now, Sir, let me introduce to you Brother Peachey 
Camehan, that’s him, and Brother Daniel Dravot, 
that is me, and the less said about our professions 
the better, for we have been most things in our 


to 3 THE MAH WHO WOULD BE KlHO. 

time. Soldier, sailor, compositor, photographer, 
proof-reader, street-preacher, and correspondents 
of the Backwoodsman when we thought the paper 
wanted one. Carnehan is sober, and so am I. 
Look at us first and see that’s sure. It will save 
you cutting into my talk. We’ll take one of your 
cigars apiece, and you shall see us light.” 

I watched the test. The men were absolutely 
sober, so I gave them each a tepid peg. 

“ Well and good,” said Carnehan of the eye- 
brows, wiping the froth from his mustache. “ Let 
me talk now, Dan. We have been all over India, 
mostly on foot. We have been boiler-fitters, 
engine-drivers, petty contractors, and all that, and 
we have decided that India isn’t big enough for 
such as us.” 

They certainly were too big for the office. 
Dravot’s beard seemed to fill half the room and 
Carnehan’s shoulders the other half, as they sat on 
the big table. Carnehan continued: “ The coun- 
try isn’t half worked out because they that governs 
it won’t let you touch it. They spend all their 
blessed time in governing it, and you can’t lift a 
spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil, nor any- 
thing like that without all the Government saying: 
* Leave it alone and let us govern.’ Therefore, 
such as it is, we will let it alone, and go away to 
some other place where a man isn’t crowded and 
can come to his own. We are not little men, and 
there is nothing that wejire afraid of except Drink, 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KINO. IO$ 

and we have signed a Contrack on that. There- 
fore, we are going away to be Kings.” 

“ Kings in our own right,” muttered Dravot. 

“ Yes, of course,” I said. “ You’ve been tramp- 
ing in the sun, and it’s a very warm night, and 
hadn’t you better sleep over the notion? Come 
to-morrow.” 

“ Neither drunk nor sunstruck,” said Dravot. 
*' We have slept over the notion half a year, and 
require to see Books and Atlases, and we have de- 
cided that there is only one place now in the world 
that two strong men can Sar-a-whack. They call 
it Kafiristan. By my reckoning it’s the top right- 
hand corner of Afghanistan, not more than three 
hundred miles from Peshawar. They have two and 
thirty heathen idols there, and we’ll be the thirty- 
third. It’s a mountaineous country, and the 
women of those parts are very beautiful.” 

“ But that is provided against in the Contrack,” 
said Carnehan. “ Neither Women nor Liqu-or, 
Daniel.” 

“ And that’s all we know, except that no one 
has gone there, and they fight, and in any place 
where they fight a man who knows how to drill 
men can always be a King. We shall go to those 
parts and say to any King we find — ‘ D’ you want 
to vanquish your foes? ’ and we will show him how 
to drill men; for that we know better than any- 
thing else. Then we will subvert that King and 
seize his Throne and establish a Dy-nasty.” 


104 T HE MAN WHO WOUL& ts£ KINS. 

“ Y ou’ll be cut to pieces before you’re fifty miles 
across the Border,” I said. “You have to travel 
through Afghanistan to get to that country. It’s 
one mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers, and 
no Englishman has been through it. The people 
are utter brutes, and even if you reached them you 
couldn’t do anything.” 

“ That’s more like,” said Carnehan. “ If you 
could think us a little more mad we would be more 
pleased. We have come to you to know about 
this country, to read a book about it, and to be 
shown maps. We want you to tell us that we are 
fools and to show us your books.” He turned to 
the book-cases. 

“ Are you at all in earnest? ” I said. 

“ A little,” said Dravot sweetly. “ As big a map 
as you have got, even if it’s all blank where Kafiris- 
tan is, and any books you’ve got. We can read, 
though we aren’t very educated.” 

I uncased the big thirty-two-miles-to-the-inch 
map of India, and two smaller Frontier maps, 
hauled down volume INF-KAN of the Encyclo- 
paedia Britannica, and the men consulted them. 

“ See here! ” said Dravot, his thumb on the map. 
“ Up to Jagdallak, Peachey and me know the road. 
We was there with Roberts’s Army. We’ll have to 
turn off to the right at Jagdallak through Lagh- 
mann territory. Then we get among the hills — 
fourteen thousand feet — fifteen thousand — -it will 
be cold work there, but it don’t look very far on the 
map.” 


The man Who Woulb be king. 10$ 

I handed him Wood on the Sources of the Oxus. 
Cornelian was deep in the Encyclopaedia. 

“ They’re a mixed lot,” said Dravot reflectively; 
“ and it won’t help us to know the names of their 
trib«s. The more tribes the more they’ll fight, 
and the better for us. From Jagdallak to Ashang. 
H’mm! ” 

“ But all the information about the country is as 
sketchy and inaccurate as can be,” I protested. 
“No one knows anything about it really. Here’s 
the file of the United Services’ Institute. Read 
what Bellew says.” 

“ Blow Bellew! ” said Carnehan. “Dan, they’re 
an all-fired lot of heathens, but this book here says 
they think they’re related to us English.” 

I smoked while the men pored over Raverty, 
Wood, the maps, and the Encyclopaedia. 

“ There is no use your waiting,” said Dravot 
politely. “ It’s about four o’clock now. We’ll go 
before six o’clock if you want to sleep, and we 
won’t steal any of the papers. Don’t you sit up. 
We’re two harmless lunatics, and if you come, to- 
morrow evening, down to the Serai we’ll say good- 
by to you.” 

“You are two fools,” I answered. “You’ll be 
turned back at the Frontier or cut up the minute 
you set foot in Afghanistan. Do you want any 
money or a recommendation down-country? I 
can help you to the chance of work next week.” 

“ Next week we shall be hard at work ourselves, 
thank you,” said Dravot. “ It isn’t so easy being 


104 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 

a King' as it looks. When we’ve got our Kingdom 
in g'oing order we’ll let you know, and you can 
come up and help us to govern it.” 

“ Would two lunatics make a Contrack like 
that? ” said Carnehan, with subdued pride, show- 
ing me a greasy half-sheet of note-paper on which 
was written the following. I copied it, then and 
there, a§ a curiosity: 

This Contract between me and you persuing 
witnesseth in the name of God — Amen and so 
forth. 

(One) That me and you will settle this matter 
together: i. e., to be Kings of Kafir- 
istan. 

(Two) That you and me will not, while this 
matter is being settled, look at any 
Liquor, nor any Woman black, 
white or brown, so as to get mixed 
up with one or the other harmful. 

(Three) That we conduct ourselves with dig- 
nity and discretion, and if one of us 
gets into trouble the other will stay 
by him. 

Signed by you and me this day. 

Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan. 

Daniel Dravot. 

Both Gentlemen at Large. 

" There was no need for the last article,” said 
Carnehan, blushing modestly; “but it looks regular. 


The man who would be kino. io? 

Now you know the sort of men that loafers are — 
we are loafers, Dan, until we get out of India — and 
do you think that we would sign a Contrack like 
that unless we was in earnest? We have kept 
away from the two things that make life worth 
having.” 

“You won’t enjoy your lives much longer if 
you are going to try this idiotic adventure. Don’t 
set the office on fire,” I said, “ and go away before 
nine o’clock.” 

I left them still poring over the maps and mak- 
ing notes on the back of the “ Contrack.” “ Be 
sure to come down to the Serai to-morrow,” were 
their parting words. 

The Kumharsen Serai is the great four-square 
sink of humanity where the strings of camels and 
horses from the North load and unload. All the 
nationalities of Central Asia may be found there, 
and most of the folk of India proper. Balkh and 
Bokhara there meet Bengal and Bombay, and try 
to draw eye-teeth. You can buy ponies, tur- 
quoises, Persian pussy-cats, saddle-bags, fat-tailed 
sheep and musk in the Kumharsen Serai, and get 
many strange things for nothing. In the after- 
noon I went down there to see whether my friends 
intended to keep their word or were lying about 
drunk. 

A priest attired in fragments of ribbons and rags 
stalked up to me, gravely twisting a child’s paper 
whirligig. Behind him was his servant, bending 
under the load of a crate of mud toys. The two 


loS 


the man who Would be king. 


were loading up two camels, and the inhabitants of 
the^ Serai watched them with shrieks of laughter. 

“ The priest is mad,” said a horse-dealer to me. 
“ He is going up to Kabul to sell toys to the Amir. 
He will either be raised to honor or have his head 
cut off. He came in here this morning and has 
been behaving madly ever since.” 

“The witless are under the protection of God,” 
stammered a flat-cheeked Usbeg in broken Hindi. 
“ They foretell future events.” 

“ Would they could have foretold that my cara- 
van would have been cut up by the Shinwaris al- 
most within shadow of the Pass!” grunted the 
Eusufzai agent of a Rajputana trading-house, 
whose goods had been feloniously diverted into the 
hands of other robbers just across the Border, and 
whose misfortunes were the laughing-stock of the 
bazaar. “ Ohe, priest, whence come you and 
whither do you go? ” 

, “ . Fr om Roum have I come,” shouted the priest, 

' waving his whirligig; “ from Roum, blown by the 
breath of a hundred devils across the sea! Oh, 
thieves, robbers, liars, the blessing of Pir Khan on 
pigs, dogs, and perjurers! Who will take the Pro- 
tected of God to the North to sell charms that are 
never still to the Amir? The camels shall not gall, 
the sons shall not fall sick, and the wives shall 
remain faithful while they are away, of the men 
who give me place in their caravan. Who will 
assist me to slipper the King of the Roos with a 
golden slipper with a silver heel? The protection 


THE MAN WHO WOULB BE KING. IO9 

of Pir Khan be upon his labors! ” He spread out 
the skirts of his gaberdine and pirouetted between 
the lines of tethered horses. 

“ There starts a caravan from Peshawar to Kabul 
in twenty days, Huzrut,” said the Eusufzai trader. 
“ My camels go therewith. Do thou also go and 
bring us good-luck.” 

“ I will go even now! ” shouted the priest. “ I 
will depart upon my winged camels, and be at 
Peshawar in a day! Ho! Hazar Mir Khan,” he 
yelled to his servant, “ drive out the camels, but 
let me first mount my own.” 

He leaped on the back of his beast as it knelt, 
and, turning round to me, cried: “ Come thou also, 
Sahib, a little along the road, and I will sell thee a 
charm — an amulet that shall make thee King of 
Kafii istan.” 

Then the light broke upon me, and I followed 
the two camels out of the Serai till we reached open 
road and the priest halted. 

“What d’you think o’ that?” said he in Eng- 
lish. “ Carnehan can’t talk their patter, so I’ve 
made him my servant. He makes a handsome 
servant. ’Tisn’t for nothing that I’ve been knock- 
ing about the country for fourteen years. Didn’t 
I do that talk neat? We’ll hitch on to a caravan at 
Peshawar till we get to Jagdallak, and then we’ll 
see if we can get donkeys for our camels, and strike 
into Kafiristan. Whirligigs for the Amir, O Lor! 
Put your hand under the camel bags and tell me 
vyhat you feel.” 


no THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 

I felt the butt of a Martini, and another and an- 
other. 

“ Twenty of ’em,” said Dravot placidly. 
“ Twenty of ’em, and ammunition to correspond, 
under the whirligigs and the mud dolls.” 

“ Heaven help you if you are caught with those 
things ! ” I said. “ A Martini is worth her weight 
in silver among the Pathans.” 

“ Fifteen hundred rupees of capital — every rupee 
we could beg, borrow, or steal — are invested on 
these two camels,” said Dravot. “ We won’t get 
caught. We’re going through the Khaiber with a 
regular caravan. Who’d touch a poor mad priest?” 

“ Have you got everything you want? ” I asked, 
overcome with astonishment. 

“ Not yet, but we shall soon. Give us a memento 
of your kindness, Brother. You did me a service 
yesterday, and that time in Marwar. Plalf my 
Kingdom shall you have, as the saying is.” I 
slipped a small charm compass from my watch- 
chain and handed it up to the priest. 

“Good-by,” said Dravot, giving me his hand cau- 
tiously. “ It’s the last time we’ll shake hands with 
an Englishman these many days. Shake hands 
with him, Camehan,” he cried, as the second camel 
passed me. 

Carnehan leaned down and shook hands. Then 
the camels passed away along the dusty road, and 
I was left alone to wonder. My eye could detect 
no failure in the disguises. The scene in the Serai 
attested that they were complete to the native 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. Ill 

mind. There was just the chance, therefore, that 
Carnehan and Dravot would be able to wander 
through Afghanistan without detection. But, be- 
yond, they would find death, certain and awful 
death. 

Ten days later a native friend of mine, giving me 
the news of the day from Peshawar, wound up his 
letter with: “ There has been much laughter here 
on account of a certain mad priest who is going in 
his estimation to sell petty gauds and insignificant 
trinkets w'hich he ascribes as great charms to H. 
H. the Amir of Bokhara. He passed through 
Peshawar and associated himself to the Second 
Summer caravan that goes to Kabul. The mer- 
chants are pleased because through superstition 
they imagine that such mad fellows bring good- 
fortune.” 

The two, then, were beyond the Border. I 
would have prayed for them, but, that night, a real 
King died in Europe, and demanded an obituary 
notice. 

The wheel of the world swings through the same 
phases again and again. Summer passed and win- 
ter thereafter, and came and passed again. The 
daily paper continued and I with it, and upon the 
third summer there fell a hot night, a night-issue, 
and a strained waiting for something to be tele- 
graphed from the other side of the world, exactly 
as had happened before. A few great men had 
died in the pa§t tW9 years, the machines worked 


JtX2 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 

with more clatter, and some of the trees in the 
Office garden were a few feet taller. But that was 
all the difference, <• 

I passed over to the press-room, and went 
through just such a scene as I have already de- 
scribed. The nervous tension was stronger than it 
had been two years before, and I felt the heat more 
acutely. At three o’clock I cried, “ Print off,” and 
turned to go, when there crept to my chair what 
was left of a man. He w T as bent into a circle, his 
head was sunk between his shoulders, and he 
moved his feet one over the other like a bear. I 
could hardly see whether he walked or crawled — 
this rag-wrapped, whining cripple who addressed 
me by name, crying that he was come back. 
“ Can you give me a drink? ” he whimpered. 
“ For the Lord’s sake, give me a drink! ” 

I went back to the office, the man following with 
groans of pain, and I turned up the lamp. 

“Don’t you know me?” he gasped, dropping 
into a chair, and he turned his drawn face, sur- 
mounted by a shock of gray hair, to the light. 

I looked at him intently. Once before had I 
seen eyebrows that met over the nose in an inch- 
broad black band, but for the life of me I could not 
tell where. 

“ I 'don’t know you,” I said, handing him the 
whisky. “ What can I do for you? ” 

He took a gulp of the spirit raw, and shivered in 
spite of the suffocating heat. 

“ I’ve come back,” he repeated; “ and I was the 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 113 

King of Kafiristan — me and Dravot — crowned 
Kings we was! In this office we settled it — ycm 
setting there and giving us the books. I am 
Peachey — Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan, and 
you've been setting here ever since — O Lord! ” 

I was more than a little astonished, and ex- 
pressed my feelings accordingly. 

“ It's true,” said Carnehan, with a dry cackle, 
nursing his feet, which were wrapped in rags. 
“ True as gospel. Kings we were, with crowns 
upon our heads — me and Dravot — poor Dan — oh, 
poor, poor Dan, that would never take advice, not 
though I begged of him! ” 

“ Take the whisky,” I said, “ and take your own 
time. Tell me all you can recollect of everything 
from beginning to end. You got across the bor- 
der on your camels, Dravot dressed as a mad priest 
and you his servant. Do you remember that? ” 

“ I aint mad — yet, but I shall be that way soon. 
Of course I remember. Keep looking at me, or 
maybe my words will go all to pieces. Keep look- 
ing at me in my eyes and don’t say anything.” 

I leaned forward and looked into his face as 
steadily as I could. He dropped one hand upon 
the table and I grasped it by the wrist. It was 
twisted like a bird’s claw, and upon the back was a 
ragged, red, diamond-shaped scar. 

“ No, don’t look there. Look at me,” said Car- 
nehan. 

“ That comes afterward, but for the Lord’s sake 
don’t distrack me. We left with that caravan, me 


1 14 the man who would be kino. 

and Dravot playing all sorts of antics to amuse the 
people we were with. Dravot used to make us 
laugh in the evenings when all the people was 
cooking their dinners — cooking their dinners, 
and . . . what did they do' then? They lit little 
fires with sparks that went into Dravot’s beard, and 
we all laughed — fit to die. Little red fires they 
was, going into Dravot’s big red beard — so funny.” 
His eyes left mine and he smiled foolishly. 

“ You went as far as Jagdallak with that cara- 
van,” I said at a venture, “ after you had lit those 
fires. To Jagdallak, where you turned off to try 
to get into Kafiristan.” 

“ No, we didn’t neither. What are you talking 
about? We turned off before Jagdallak, because 
we heard the roads was good. But they wasn’t 
good enough for our two camels — mine and Dra- 
vot’s. When we left the caravan, Dravot took off 
all his clothes and mine too, and said we would be 
heathen, because the Kaffirs didn’t allow Moham- 
medans to talk to them. So we dressed betwixt 
and between, and such a sight as Daniel Dravot I 
never saw yet nor expect to see again. He burned 
half his beard, and slung a sheep-skin over his 
shoulder, and shaved his head into patterns. He 
shaved mine, too, and made me wear outrageous 
things to look like a heathen. That was in a most 
mountaineous country, and our camels couldn’t go 
along any more because of the mountains. They 
were tall and black, and coming home I saw them 
fight like wild goats — there are lots of goats in 


THE MAN WHO WOULB BE KINO, ITS 

Kafiristan. And these mountains, they never keep 
still, no more than the goats. Always fighting 
they are, and don’t let you sleep at night.” 

“ Take some more whisky,” I said very slowly 
“ What did you and Daniel Dravot do when the 
camels could go no further because of the rough 
roads that led into Kafiristan? ” 

“ What did which do? There was a party called 
Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan that was with Dra- 
vot. Shall I tell you about him? He died out 
there in the cold. Slap from the bridge fell old 
Peachey, turning and twisting in the air like a 
penny whirligig that you can sell to the Amir. 
No; they was two for three ha’pence, those whirli- 
gigs, or I am much mistaken and woeful sore. 
And then these camels were no use, and Peachey 
said to Dravot — ‘ For the Lord’s sake, let’s get out 
of this before our heads are chopped off,’ and with 
that they killed the camels all among the moun- 
tains, not having anything in particular to eat, but 
first they took off the boxes with the guns and the 
ammunition, till two men came along driving four 
mules. Dravot up and dances in front of them, 
singing, — ‘ Sell me four mules.’ Says the first 
many — ‘ If you are rich enough to buy, you are 
rich enough to rob; ’ but before ever he could put 
his hand to his knife, Dravot breaks his neck over 
his knee, and the other party runs away. So Car- 
nehan loaded the mules with the rifles that was 
taken off the camels, and together we starts for- 
ward into those bitter cold mountaineous parts, 


Il6 THE MAN WH® WOULD BE KING. 

and never a road broader than the back of your 
hand.” 

He paused for a moment, while I asked him if he 
could remember the nature of the country through 
which he had journeyed. 

“ I am telling you as straight as I can, but my 
head isn’t as good as it might be. They drove 
nails through it to make me hear better how Dra- 
vot died. The country was mountaineous and the 
mules were most contrary, and the inhabitants was 
dispersed and solitary. They went up and up, and 
down and down, and that other party, Carnehan, 
was imploring of Dravot not to sing and whistle 
so loud, for fear of bringing down the tremenjus 
avalanches. But Dravot says that if a King 
couldn’t sing it wasn’t worth being King, and 
whacked the mules over the rump, and never took 
no heed for ten cold days. We came to a big level 
valley all among the mountains, and the mules 
were near dead, so we killed them, not having any- 
thing in special for them or us to eat. We sat 
upon the boxes, and played odd and even with the 
cartridges that was jolted out. 

“ Then ten men with bows and arrows ran down 
that valley, chasing twenty men with bows and 
arrows, and the row was tremenjus. They was fair 
men — fairer than you or me — with yellow hair and 
remarkable well built. Says Dravot, unpacking 
the guns — ‘ This is the beginning of the business. 
We’ll fight for the ten men,’ and with that he fires 
two rifles at the twenty men, and drops one of them 


fME maM who Would be kinS. ilj 

at two hundred yards from the rock where we was 
sitting. The other men began to run, but Carne- 
han and Dravot sits on the boxes picking them off 
at all ranges, up and down the valley. Then we 
goes up to the ten men that had run across the 
snow too, and they fires a footy little arrow at us. 
Dravot he shoots above their heads and they all 
falls down flat. Then he walks over them and 
kicks them, and then he lifts them up and shakes 
hands all round to make them friendly like. He 
calls them and gives them the boxes to carry, and' 
waves his hand for all the world as though he was 
King already. They takes the boxes and him 
across the valley and up the hill into a pine wood 
on the top, where there was half a dozen big stone 
idols. Dravot he goes to the biggest — a fellow 
they call Imbra — and laj^s a rifle and a cartridge at 
his feet, rubbing his nose respectful w T ith his own 
nose, patting him on the head, and saluting in front 
of it. He turns round to the men and nods his 
head, and says, — ‘ That’s all right. I’m in the 
know too, and all these old jim-jams are my friends.’ 
Then he opens his mouth and points down it, and 
when the first man brings him food, he says — ‘ No;’ 
and when the second man brings him food, he says 
— ‘ No;’ but when one of the old priests and the 
boss of the village brings him food, he says — * Yes;’ 
very haughty, and eats it slow. That was how we 
came to our first village, without any trouble, just 
as though we had tumbled from the skies. But we 
tumbled from one of those d d rope-bridges, 


IlS THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 

you see, and you couldn't expect a man to laugh 
much after that." 

“ Take some more whisky and go on," I said. 
“ That w r as the first village you came into. How 
did you get to be King? " 

“ I wasn't King," said Carnehan. “ Dravot he 
was the King, and a handsome man he looked with 
the gold crown on his head and all. Him and the 
other party stayed in that village, and every morn- 
ing Dravot sat by the side of old Imbra, and the 
people came and worshiped. That was Dravot's 
order. Then a lot of men came into the valley, and 
Carnehan and Dravot picks them off with the rifles 
before they knew where they was, and runs down 
into the valley and up again the? other side, and 
finds another village, same as the first one, and the 
people all falls down flat on their faces, and Dravot 
says, — ‘ Now what is the trouble between you two 
villages? ' and the people points to a woman, as 
fair as you or me, that was carried off, and Dravot 
takes her back to the first village and counts up the 
dead — eight there was. For each dead man Dra- 
vot pours a little milk on the ground and waves his 
arms like a whirligig and ‘ That's all right,' says he. 
Then he and Carnehan takes the big boss of each 
village by the arm and walks them down into the 
valley, and shows them how to scratch a line with a 
spear right down the valley, and gives each a sod 
of turf from both sides o' the line. Then all the 
people comes down and shouts like the devil and 
dl, and Dravot says, — ‘ Go and dig the land, and 


THE MAN WHO WoNLD BE KING. IXtJ 

Ke fruitful and multiply,’ which they did, though 
they didn’t understand. Then we asks the names 
of things in their lingo — bread and water and fire 
and idols and such, and Dravot leads the priest of 
each village up to the idol, and says he must sit 
there and judge the people, and if anything goes 
wrong he is to be shot. 

, “ Next week they was all turning up the land in 

ithe valley as quiet as bees and much prettier, and 
the priests heard all the complaints and told Dra- 
vot in dumb show what it was about. ‘ That’s just 
the beginning,’ says Dravot. ‘ They think we’re 
Gods.’ He and Carnehan picks out twenty good 
men and shows them how to click off a rifle, and 
form fours, and advance in line, and they was very 
pleased to do so, and clever to see the hang of it. 
Then he takes out his pipe and his baccy-pouch 
and leaves one at one village and one at the other, 
and off we two goes to see what was to be done in 
the next valley. That was all rock, and there was 
a little village there, and Garnehan says, — ‘ Send 
'em to the old valley to plant,’ and takes ’em there 
and gives ’em some land that wasn’t took before. 
They were a poor lot, and we blooded ’em with a 
kid before letting ’em into the new Kingdom. 
That was to impress the people, and then they 
settled down quiet, and Carnehan went back to 
Dravot, who had got into another valley, all snow 
and ice and most mountaineous. There was no 
people there and the Army got afraid, so Dravot 
shoots one of them, and goes on till he finds some 


110 THE MAN WHO WOXJLB BE klNd. 

people in a village, and the Army explains that un- 
less the people wants to be killed they had better 
not shoot their little matchlocks; for they had 
matchlocks. We makes friends with the priest 
and I stays there alone with two of the Army, 
teaching the men how to drill, and a thundering 
big Chief comes across the snow with kettle-drums 
and horns twanging, because he heard there was a 
new God kicking about. Carnehan sights for the 
brown of the men half a mile across the snow and 
wings one of them. Then he sends a message to 
the Chief that, unless he wished to be killed, he 
must come and shake hands with me and leave his 
arms behind. The Chief comes alone first, and 
Carnehan shakes hands with him and whirls his 
arms about, same as Dravot used, and very much 
surprised that Chief was, and strokes my eyebrows. 
Then Carnehan goes alone to the Chief, and asks 
him in dumb show if he had an enemy he hated. 
* I have/ says the Chief. So Carnehan weeds out 
the pick of his men, and sets two of the Army 
to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the 
men can maneuver about as well as Volunteers. 
So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain 
on the top of a mountain, and the Chief's m®n 
rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis 
firing into the brown of the enemy. So we took 
that village too, and I gives the Chief a rag from 
my coat and says, ‘ Occupy till I come: ’ which was 
scriptural. By way of a reminder, when me and 
the Army was eighteen hundred yards away, I 


ttfE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. t$2 

drops a bullet near him standing on the snow, and 
all the people falls flat on their faces. Then I sends 
a letter to Dravot, wherever he be by land or by 
sea.” 

At the risk of throwing the creature out of train 
I interrupted, — “ How could you write a letter up 
yonder? ” 

“The letter? — Oh! — The letter! Keep looking 
at me between the eyes, please. It was a string- 
talk letter, that we’d learned the way of it from a 
'blind beggar in the Punjab.” 

I remembered that there had once come to the 
office a blind man with a knotted twig and a piece 
of string which he wound round the twig according 
to some cipher of his own. He could, after the 
lapse of days or hours, repeat the sentence which 
he had reeled up. He had reduced the alphabet to 
eleven primitive sounds; and tried to teach me his 
method, but failed. 

“ I sent that letter to Dravot,” said Carnehan; 
“ and told him to come back because this Kingdom 
was growing too big for me to handle, and then I 
struck for the first valley, to see how the priests 
were working. They called the village we took 
along with the Chief, Bashkai, and the first village 
we took, Er-Heb. The priests at Er-Heb was 
doing all right, but they had a lot of pending cases 
about land to show me, and some men from an- 
other village had been firing arrows at night. I 
went out and looked for that village and fired four 
rounds at it from a thousand yards. That used all 


THE MAH WHO WOULD BE fciHS. 

the cartridges I cared to spend, and I waited for 
Dravot, who had been away two or three months, 
and I kept my people quiet. 

“ One morning I heard the devil’s own noise of 
drums and horns, and Dan Dravot marches down 
the hill with his Army and a tail of hundreds of 
men, and, which was the most amazing — a great 
gold crown on his head. * My Gord, Carnehan/ 
says Daniel, ‘ this is a tremenjus business, and 
we’ve got the whole country as far as it’s worth 
haying. I am the son of Alexander by Queen 
Semiramis, and you’re my younger brother and a 
God too! It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever seen. 
I’ve been marching and fighting for six weeks with 
the Army, and every footy little village for fifty 
miles has come in rejoiceful; and more than that, 
I’ve got the key of the whole show, as you’ll see, 
and I’ve got a crown for you! I told ’em to make 
two of ’em at a place called Shu, where the gold 
lies in the rock like suet in mutton. Gold I’ve 
Seen, and turquoise I’ve kicked out of the cliffs, and 
there’s garnets in the sands of the river, and here’s 
a chunk of amber that a man brought me. Call up 
all the priests and, here, take your crown/ 

“ One of the men opens a black hair bag and I 
slips the crown on. It was too small and too 
heavy, but I wore it for the glory. Hammered 
gold it was — five pound weight, like a hoop of a 
barrel. 

“ ‘ Peachey/ says Dravot, ‘ we don’t want to 
fight no more. The Craft’s the trick, so help me ! 9 


tHE MAN WHO WOULD BE KINO. I2» 

and he brings forward that same Chief that I left at 
Bashkai — Billy Fish we called him afterward, be- 
cause he was so like Billy Fish that drove the big 
tank-engine at Mach on the Bolan in the old days. 
‘ Shake hands with him,’ says Dravot, and I shook 
hands and nearly dropped, for Billy Fish gave me 
the Grip. I said nothing, but tried him with the 
Fellow Craft Grip. He answers, all right, and I 
tried the Master’s’ Grip, but that was a slip. ‘ A 
Fellow Craft he is!’ I says to Dan. ‘Does he 
know the word? ’ ‘ He does,’ says Dan, ‘ and all 

the priests know. It’s a miracle! The Chiefs and 
the priests can work a Fellow Craft Lodge in a way 
that’s very like ours, and they’ve cut the marks on 
the rocks, but they don’t know the Third Degree, 
and they’ve come to find out. It’s Gord’s Truth. 
I’ve known these long years that the Afghans knew 
up to the Fellow Craft Degree, but this is a miracle. 
A God and a Grand-Master of the Craft am I, and 
a Lodge in the Third Degree I will open, and we’ll 
raise the head priests and the Chiefs of the villages.’ 

“ ‘ It’s against all the law,’ I says, ‘ holding a 
Lodge without warrant from anyone; and we never 
held office in any Lodge.’ 

“ ‘ It’s a master-stroke of policy,’ says Dravot. 
* It means running the country as easy as a four- 
wheeled bogy on a down grade. We can’t stop to 
inquire now, or they’ll turn against us. I’ve forty 
Chiefs at my heel, and passed and raised according 
to their merit they shall be. Billet these men on 
the villages and see that we run up a Lodge of 


S24 THE MAS WHO WOOlH BE 

some kind. The temple of Imbra will do fol the 
Lodge-room. The women must make aprons as 
you show them. I’ll hold a levee of Chiefs to- 
night and Lodge to-morrow.’ 

“ I was fair run off my legs, but I wasn’t such a 
fool as not to see what a pull this Craft business 
gave us. I showed the priests’ families how to 
make aprons of the degrees, but for Dravot’s apron 
the blue border and marks was made of turquoise 
lumps on white hide, not cloth. We took a great 
square stone in the temple for the Master’s chair, 
and little stones for the officers’ chairs, and painted 
the black pavement with white squares, and did 
what we could to make things regular. 

“ At the levee which was held that night on the 
hillside with big bonfires, Dravot gives out that 
him and me were Gods and sons of Alexander, and 
Past Grand-Masters in the Craft, and was come to 
make Kafiristan a country where every man should 
cat in peace and drink in quiet, and specially obey 
us. Then the Chiefs come round to shake hands, 
and they was so hairy and white and fair it was just 
shaking hands with old friends. We gave them 
names according as they was like men we had 
known in India — Billy Fish, Holly Dilworth, Pikky 
Kergan that was Bazaar-master when I was at 
Mhow, and so on and so on. 

“ The most amazing miracle was at Lodge next 
night. One of the old priests was watching us 
continuous, and I felt uneasy, for I knew we’d have 
to fudge the Ritual, and I didn’t know what the 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KINO. * 2 5 

men knew. Tlie old priest whs h strHng’cr come in. 
from beyond the village of Bashkai. The minute 
Dravot puts on the Master s apron that the giriS 
had made for him, the priest fetches a whoop and a 
howl, and tries to overturn the stone that Dravot 
was sitting on. ' It’s all up now, I says. That 
comes of meddling with the Craft without war- 
rant’ ’ Dravot never winked an eye, not when ten 
priests took and tilted over the Grand-Master’s 
chair — which was to say the stone of Imbra. The 
priest begins rubbing the bottom end of it to clear 
away the black dirt, and presently he shows all the 
other priests the Master’s Mark, same as w r as on 
Dravot’s apron, cut into the stone. Not even the } 
priests of the temple of Imbra knew it was there. 
The old chap falls flat on his face at Dravot’s feet 
and kisses ’em. ‘ Luck again,’ says Dravot, across 
the Lodge to me, ‘ they say it’s the missing Mark 
that no one could understand the why of. We re 
mo' e than safe now.’ Then he bangs the butt of 
his gun for a gavel and says:—' By virtue of the 
authority vested in me by my own right hand ana 
the help of Peachey, I declare myself Grand-Mas- 
ter of all Freemasonry in Kafiristan in this the 
Mother Lodge o’ the country, and King of Kafiris- 
tan equally with Peachey! ’ At that he puts on Ins 
crown and I puts on mine— I was. doing Senior 
Warden — and we opens the Lodge in most ampie 
form. It was an amazing miracle! The priests 
moved in Lodge through the first two degrees al- 
most without telling, as if the memory was coming 


X §6 T m MAN WHO WOULD BS KING* 

back to them. After that, Peachey and Dravot 
raised such as was worthy — high priests and Chiefs 
of far-off villages. Billy Fish was the first, and I 
can tell you we scared the soul out of him. It was 
not in any way according to Ritual, but it served 
our turn. We didn't raise more than ten of the 
biggest men because we didn't want to make the 
Degree common. And they was clamoring to be 
raised. 

“ ‘ In another six months,' says Dravot, ‘ we'll 
hold another Communication and see how you are 
working.' Then he asks them about their villages, 
and learns that they was fighting one against the 
other and were fair sick and tired of it. And when 
they wasn't doing that they was fighting with the 
Mohammedans. ‘ You can fight those when they 
come into our country,' says Dravot. ‘ Tell off 
every tenth man of your tribes for a Frontier 
guard, and send two hundred at a time to this val- 
ley to be drilled. Nobody is going to be shot or 
speared any more so long as he does well, and I 
know that you won't cheat me because you're 
white people — sons of Alexander — and not like 
common black Mohammedans. You are my 
people and by God,' says he, running off into Eng- 
lish at the end — ‘ I’ll make a d d fine Nation of 

you, or I'll die in the making! ' 

“ I can't tell all we did for the next six months 
bee, *se Dravot did a lot I couldn't see the hang of, 
and he "earned their lingo in a way I never could. 
My work was to help the people plow, and now 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 12? 

and again go out with some of the Army and see 
what the other villages were doing, and make ’em 
throw rope-bridges across the ravines which cut up 
the country horrid. Dravot was very kind to me, 
but when he walked up and down in the pine wood, 
pulling that bloody red beard of his with both fists, 
I knew he was thinking plans I could not advise 
him about, and I just waited for orders. 

“ But Dravot never showed me disrespect be- 
fore the people. They were afraid of me and the 
Army, but they loved Dan. He was the best of 
friends with the priests and the Chiefs; but anyone 
could come across the hills with a complaint and 
Dravot would hear him out fair, and call four priests 
together and say what was to be done. He used 
to call in Billy Fish from Bashkai, and Pikky Ker- 
gan from Shu, and an old Chief we called Kafuze- 
lum — it was like enough to his real name — and 
hold councils with ’em when there was any fighting 
to be done in small villages. That was his Council 
of War, and the four priests of Bashkai, Shu, Kha- 
wak, and Madora was his Privy Council. Between 
the lot of ’em they sent me, with forty men and 
twenty rifles, and sixty men carrying turquoises, 
into the Ghorband country to buy those hand- 
made Martini rifles, that come out of the Amir's 
workshops at Kabul, from one of the Amir’s Herati 
regiments that would have sold the very teeth out 
of their mouths for turquoises. 

“ I stayed in Ghorband a month, and gave the 
Governor there the pick of my baskets for hush- 


128 


THE MAN WHO WOUU5 BE KING. 


money, and bribed the Colonel of the regiment 
some more, and, between the two and the tribes- 
people, we got more than a hundred hand-made 
Martinis, a hundred good Kohat Jezails that’ll 
throw to six hundred yards, and forty man-loads of 
very bad ammunition for the rifles. I came back 
with what I had, and distributed ’em among the 
men that the Chiefs sent in to me to drill. Dravot 
was too busy to attend to those things, but the old 
Army that we first made helped me, and we turned 
out five hundred men that could drill, and two hun- 
dred that knew how to hold arms pretty straight. 
Even those cork-screwed, hand-made guns was a 
miracle to them. Dravot talked big about powder- 
shops and factories, walking up and down in the 
pine wood when the winter was coming on. 

“ ' I won’t make a Nation,’ says he. ‘ I’ll make 
an Empire! These men aren’t niggers; they’re 
English! Look at their eyes— look at their 
mouths. Look at the way they stand up. They 
, sit on chairs in their own houses. They’re the 
Lost Tribes, or something like it, and they’ve 
grown to be English. I’ll take a census in the 
spring if the priests don’t get frightened. There 
must be a fair two million of ’em in these hills. 
The villages are full o’ little children. Two million 
people — two hundred and fifty thousand fighting 
men and all English ! They only want the rifles 
and a little drilling. Two hundred and fifty thou- 
sand men, ready to cut in on Russia’s right flank 
when she tries for India! Peachey, man,’ he says. 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE 


T29 


chewing his beard in great hunks, ‘ we shall be em- 
perors of the Earth! Rajah Brooke will be a suck- 
ling to us. I’ll treat with the Viceroy on equal 
terms. I’ll ask him to send me twelve picked Eng- 
lish — twelve that I know of — to help us govern a 
bit. There’s Mackray, Sergeant-pensioner at Se- 
gowli — many’s the good dinner he’s given me, and 
his wife a pair of trousers. There’s Donkin, the 
Warder of Tounghoo Jail; there’s hundreds that I 
could lay my hand on if I was in India. The 
Viceroy shall do it for me. I’ll send a man through 
in the spring for those men, and I’ll write for a dis- 
pensation from the Grand Lodge for what I’ve 
done as Grand-Master. That — and all the Sniders 
that’ll be thrown out when the native troops in 
India take up the Martini. They’ll be worn 
smooth, but they’ll do for fighting in these hi' „. 
Twelve English, a hundred thousand Sniders run 
through the Amir’s country in driblets — I’d be 
content with twenty thousand in one year — and 
we’d be an Empire. When everything was ship- 
shape, I’d hand over the crowm — this crown I’m 
wearing now — to Queen Victoria on my knees, 
and she’d say: — “Rise up, Sir Daniel Dravot.” 
Oh, it’s big! It’s big, I tell you! But there’s so 
much to be done in every place — Bashkai, Kha- 
wak, Shu, and everywhere else.’ 

“ ‘ What is it? ’ I says. ‘ There are no more men 
coming in to be drilled this autumn. Look at 
those fat, black clouds. They’re bringing the 
snow/ 


1^0 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 

44 4 It isn’t that/ says Daniel, putting his hand 
very hard on my shoulder; ‘ and I don’t wish to say 
anything that’s against you, for no other living 
man would have followed me and made me what I 
am as you have done. You’re a first-class Com- 
mander-in-Chief, and the people know you; but— 
it’s a big country, and somehow you can’t help me, 
Peachey, in the way I want to be helped.! 

41 'Go to your blasted priests, then! ’ I said, and I 
was sorry when I made that remark, but it did hurt 
me sore to find Daniel talking so super or when I’d 
drilled all the men, and done all he told me. 

46 4 Don’t let’s quarrel, Peachey,’ says Daniel 
without cursing. ‘ You’re a King too, and the 
half of this Kingdom is yours; but can’t you see, 
Peachey, we want cleverer men than us now — • 
three or four of ’em, that we can scatter about for 
our Deputies. It’s a hugeous great State, and I 
can’t always tell the right thing to do, and I haven’t 
time for all I want to do, and here’s the winter 
coming on and all.’ He put half his beard 
into his mouth, and it was as red as the gold of 
his crown. 

44 4 I’m sorry, Daniel,’ says I. 4 I’ve done all I 
could. I’ve drilled the men and shown the people 
how to stack their oats better; and I’ve brought in 
those tinware rifles from Ghorband — but I know 
what you’re driving at. I take it Kings always 
feel oppressed that way.’ 

44 4 There’s another thing too/ says Di wot* 
walking up and down. ‘ The winter’s cominj 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 131 

these people won’t be giving much trouble, and if 
they do we can’t move about. I want a wife.’ 

“ ‘ For Gord’s sake leave the women alone! ’ I 
says. ‘ We’ve both got all the work we can, 
though I am a fool. Remember the Contrack, and 
keep clear o’ women.’ 

“ ‘ The Contrack only lasted till such time as we 
was Kings; and Kings we have been these months 
past,’ says Dravot, weighing his crown in his hand. 

| ‘ You go get a wife too, Peachey — a nice, strappin’, 
plump girl that’ll keep you warm in the winter. 
They’re prettier than English girls, and we can 
take the pick of ’em. Boil ’em once or twice in 
hot water, and they’ll come as fair as chicken and 
ham.’ 

“ ‘ Don’t tempt me! ’ I says. ‘ I will not have 
any dealings with a woman not till we are a dam’ 
side more settled than we are now. I’ve been doing 
the work o’ two men, and you’ve been doing the 
work o’ three. Let’s lie off a bit, and see if we can 
get some better tobacco from Afghan country and 
run in some good liquor; but no women.’ 

“ ‘ Who’s talking o’. women? ’ says Dravot. ‘ I 
said wife — a Queen to breed a King’s son for the 
King. A Queen out of the strongest tribe, that’ll 
make them your blood-brothers, and that’ll lie by 
your side and tell you all the people thinks about 
you and their own affairs. That’s what I want.’ 

“ ‘ Do you remember that Bengali woman I kept 
at Mogul Serai when I was a plate-layer? ’ says I. 
‘ A fat lot o’ good she was to me. She taught me 


t$s the man who would be kino. 

the lingo and one or two other things; but what 
happened? She ran away with the Station Mas- 
ter’s servant and half my month’s pay. Then she 
turned up at Dadur Junction in tow of a half-caste, 
and had the impidence to say I was her husband — 
all among the drivers in the running-shed ! ’ 

“ ' We’ve done with that,’ says Dravot. ‘ These 
women are whiter than you or me, and a Queen I 
will have for the winter months.’ 

“ ‘ For the last time o’ asking, Dan, do not,’ I 
says. ‘ It’ll only bring us harm. The Bible says 
that Kings aint to waste their strength on women, f 
’specially when they’ve got a new raw Kingdom to 
work over.’ 

“ ‘ For the last time of answering I will,’ said 
Dravot, and he went away through the pine-trees 
looking like a big red devil. The low sun hit his 
crown and beard on one side, and the two blazed 
like hot coals. 

“ But getting a wife was not as easy as Dan 
thought. He put it before the Council, and there 
was no answer till Billy Fish said that he’d better 

ask the girls. Dravot d d them all round. 

\ What’s wrong with me? ’ he shouts, standing by 
the idol Imbra. ‘ Am I a dog or am I not enough 
of a man for your wenches? Haven’t I put the 
shadow of my hand over this country? Who 
stopped the last Afghan raid? ’ It was me really, 
but Dravot was too angry to remember. ‘ Who 
bought your guns? Who repaired the bridges? 
Who’s the Grand-Master of the sign cut in th* 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 

stone? and he thumped his hand on the biock that 
he used to sit on in Lodge, and at Council, which 
opened like Lodge always. Billy Fish said noth- 
ing and no more did the others. ‘ Keep your hair 
on, Dan,’ said I; 'and ask the girls. That’s how 
it’s done at Home, and these people are quite 
English.’ 

“ ‘The marriage of the King is a matter of State/ 
says Dan, in a W'hite-hot rage, for he could feel, I 
hope, that he was going against his better mind. 
He walked out of the Council-room, and the others 
sat still, looking at the ground. 

“ ‘ Billy Fish,’ says I to the Chief of Bashkai, 
‘what’s the difficulty here? A straight answer to 
a true friend.’ ‘ You know,’ says Billy Fish. 
‘ How should a man tell you who know every- 
thing? How can daughters of men marry Gods or 
Devils? It’s not proper.’ 

“ I remembered something like that in the Bible; 
but if, after seeing us as long as they had, they still 
believed we were Gods, it wasn’t for me to unde- 
ceive them. 

“ ‘ A God can do anything,’ says I. ‘ If the 
King is fond of a girl he’ll not let her die.’ ‘ She’ll 
ihare to,’ said Billy Fish. ‘ There are all sorts of 
^Gods and Devils in these mountains, and now and 
again a girl marries one of them and isn’t seen any 
more. Besides, you two know the Mark cut in 
the stone. Only the Gods know that. We thought 
you were men till you showed the sign of the 
Master.’ 


*54 THE MAN ^"HO WOULD BE KINO. '1 

" I wished then that we had explained about the 
loss of the genuine secrets of a Master-Mason at 
the first go-off ; but I said nothing. All that night 
there was a blowing of horns in a little dark temple 
halfway down the hill, and I heard a girl crying fit 
to die. One of the priests told us that she was 
being prepared to marry the King. 

“ ‘ I’ll have no nonsense of that kind,’ says Dan. 
‘ I don’t want to interfere with your customs, but 
I’ll take my own wife.’ ‘ The girl’s a little bit 
afraid,’ says the priest. ‘ She thinks she’s going to 
die, and they are a-heartening of her up down in 
the temple.’ 

“ ‘ Hearten her very tender, then,’ says. Dravot, 
‘ or I’ll hearten you with the butt of a gun so that 
you’ll never want to be heartened again.’ He 
licked his lips, did Dan, and stayed up walking 
about more than half the night, thinking of the 
wife that he was going to get in the morning. I 
wasn’t by any means comfortable, for I knew that 
dealings with a woman in foreign parts, though you 
was a crowned King twenty times over, could not 
but be risky. I got up very early in the morning 
while Dravot was asleep, and I saw the priests talk- 
ing together in whispers, and the Chiefs talking 
together too, and they looked at me out of the cor- 
ners of their eyes. 

“ * What is up, Fish? ’ I says to the Bashkai man, 
who was wrapped up in his furs and looking splen- 
did to behold. 

“ ‘ I can’t rightly say,’ says he; * but if you can 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 1 35 

induce the King- to drop all this nonsense about 
marriage, you’ll be doing him and me and yourself 
a great service.’ 

“ ‘ That I do believe/ says I. ‘ But sure, you 
know, Billy, as well as me, having fought against 
and for us, that the King and me are nothing more 
than two of the finest men that God Almighty ever 
made. Nothing more, I do assure you.’ 

“ ‘ That may be,’ says Billy Fish, ‘ and yet I 
should be sorry if it was.’ He sinks his head upon 
his great fur cloak for a minute and thinks 
' King,’ says he, ‘ be you man or God or Devil, IT 
stick by you to-day. I have twenty of my men 
with me, and they will follow me. We’ll go to 
Bashkai until the storm blows over.’ 

“ A little snow had fallen in the night, and every- 
thing was white except the greasy fat clouds that 
blew down and down from the north. Dravot 
came out with his crown on his head, swinging his 
arms and stamping his feet, and looking more 
pleased than Punch. 

‘“For the last time, drop it, Dan,’ says I in a 
whisper. * Billy Fish here says that there will be a 
row.’ 

“ ‘ A row among my people ! ’ says Dravot. 
* Not much. Peachey, you’re a fool not to get a 
wife too. Where’s the girl? ’ says he with a voice 
as loud as the braying of a jackass. ‘ Cali up all 
the Chiefs and priests, and let the Emperor see if 
his wife suits him.’ 

“ There was no need to call anyone. They were 


I36 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 

all there leaning on their guns and spears round 
the clearing in the center of the pine wood. A 
deputation of priests went down to the little temple 
to bring up the girl, and the horns blew up fit to 
wake the dead. Billy F ; sh saunters round and 
gets as close to Daniel as lie could, and behind him 
stood his twenty men with matchlocks. Not a 
man of them under six feet. I was next to Dravot, 
and behind me was twenty men of the regular 
Army. Up comes the girl, and a strapping wench 
she was, covered with silver and turquoises but 
white as death, and looking back every minute at 
the priests. 

“ ‘ She’ll do,’ said Dan, looking her over. 
' What’s to be afraid of, lass? Come and kiss me.' 
He puts his arm round her. She shuts her eyes, 
gives a bit of a squeak, and down goes her face in 
the side of Dan’s flaming red beard. 

“‘The slut’s bitten me!’ says he, clapping his 
hand to his neck, and, sure enough, his hand was 
red with blood. Billy Fish and two of his match- 
lock-men catches hold of Dan by the shoulders and 
drags him into the Bashkai lot, while the priests 
howls in their lingo — ‘ Neither God nor Devil, but 
a man ! ’ I was all taken aback, for a priest cut at 
me in front, and the Army behind began firing into 
the Bashkai men. 

“ ‘ God A-mighty ! ’ says Dan. ‘ What is the 
meaning o’ this? ’ 

“‘Come back! Come away!' says Billy Fish. 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. t$f 

'Ruin and Mutiny is the matter. We*ll break for 
Bashkai if we can.’ 

“ I tried to give some sort of orders to my men 
— the men o’ the regular Army — but it was no use, 
so I fired into the brown of ’em with an English 
Martini and drilled three beggars in a line. The 
valley was full of shouting, howling creatures, and 
every soul was shrieking, ‘ Not a God nor a Devil, 
but only a man ! ’ The Bashkai troops stuck to 
Billy Fish all they were worth, but their match- 
locks wasn’t half as good as the Kabul breech- 
loaders, and four of them dropped. Dan was bel- 
lowing like a bull, for he was veiy wrathy ; and Billy 
Fish had a hard job to prevent him running out at 
the crowd. 

'“We can’t stand,’ says Billy Fish. * Make a 
run for it down the valley! The whole place is 
against us.’ The matchlock-men ran, and we went 
down the valley in spite of Dravot’s protestations. 
He was swearing horribly and crying out that he 
was King. The priests rolled great stones on us, 
and the regular Army fired hard, and there wasn’t 
more than six men, not counting Dan, Billy Fish, 
and Me, that came down to the bottom of the 
valley alive. 

W Then they stopped firing and the horns in the 
temple blew again. ‘ Come away — for Gord’s sake 
come away!’ says Billy Fish. ‘They’ll send run- 
ners out to all the villages before ever we get to 
Bashkai. I can protect you there., but I can’t fct 
anything now.’ 


l$6 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 

all there leaning on their guns and spears round 
the clearing in the center of the pine wood. A 
deputation of priests went down to the little temple 
to bring up the girl, and the horns blew up fit to 
wake the dead. Billy Fish saunters round and 
gets as close to Daniel as he could, and behind him 
stood his twenty men with matchlocks. Not a 
man of them under six feet. I was next to Dravot, 
and behind me was twenty men of the regular 
Army. Up comes the girl, and a strapping wench 
she was, covered with silver and turquoises but 
white as death, and looking back every minute at 
the priests. 

“ ‘ She’ll do/ said Dan, looking her over. 
4 What’s to be afraid of, lass? Come and kiss me/ 
He puts his arm round her. She shuts her eyes, 
gives a bit of a squeak, and down goes her face in 
the side of Dan’s flaming red beard. 

“ 4 The slut’s bitten me!’ says he, clapping his 
hand to his neck, and, sure enough, his hand was 
red with blood. Billy Fish and two of his match- 
lock-men catches hold of Dan by the shoulders and 
drags him into the Bashkai lot, while the priests 
howls in their lingo — ‘ Neither God nor Devil, but 
a man ! ’ I was all taken aback, for a priest cut at 
me in front, and the Army behind began firing into 
the Bashkai men. 

44 4 God A-mighty!’ says Dan. ‘ What is the 
meaning o’ this? ’ 

“‘Come back! Come away!’ says Billy Fish. 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 

* Ruin and Mutiny is the matter. We’ll break for 
Bashkai if we can.’ 

“ I tried to give some sort of orders to my men 
— the men o’ the regular Army — but it was no use, 
so I fired into the brown of ’em with an English 
Martini and drilled three beggars in a line. The 
valley was full of shouting, howling creatures, and 
every soul was shrieking, ‘ Not a God nor a Devil, 
but only a man!’ The Bashkai troops stuck to 
Billy Fish all they were worth, but their match- 
locks wasn’t half as good as the Kabul breech- 
loaders, and four of them dropped. Dan was bel- 
lowing like a bull, for he was very wrathy; and Billy 
Fish had a hard job to prevent him running out at 
the crowd. 

"‘We can’t stand,’ says Billy Fish. ‘ Make a 
run for it down the valley! The whole place is 
against us.’ The matchlock-men ran, and we went 
down the valley in spite of Dravot’s protestations. 
He was swearing horribly and crying out that he 
was King. The priests rolled great stones on us, 
and the regular Army fired hard, and there wasn’t 
more than six men, not counting Dan, Billy Fish, 
and Me, that came down to the bottom of the 
valley alive. 

’‘Then they stopped firing and the horns in the 
temple blew again. ‘ Come away — for Gord’s sake 
come away!’ says Billy Fish. ‘They’ll send run- 
ners out to all the villages before ever we get to 
Bashkai. I can protect you there, but I can’t 
anything now.’ 


140 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KINO. 

M ' I’m a Chief,’ says Billy Fish, quite quiet. * I 
stay with you. My men can go.’ 

“ The Bashkai fellows didn’t wait for a second 
word but ran off, and Dan and Me and Billy Fish 
walked across to where the drums were drumming 
and the horns w r ere horning. It was cold — awful 
cold. I’ve got that cold in the back of my head 
now. There’s a lump of it there.” 

The punkah-coolies had gone to sleep. Two 
kerosene lamps w r ere blazing in the office, and the 
perspiration poured down my face and splashed on 
the blotter as I leaned forward. Carnehan was 
shivering, and I feared that his mind might go. I 
wiped my face, took a fresh grip of the piteously 
mangled hands, and said: — “ What happened after 
that?” 

The momentary shift of my eyes had broken the 
clear current. 

“ What was you pleased to say? ” whined Carne- 
han. “ They took them without any sound. Not 
a little whisper all along the snow, not though the 
King knocked down the first man that set hand on 
him — not though old Peachey fired his last car- 
tridge into the brown of ’em. Not a single solitary 
sound did those swines make. They just closed up 
tight, and I tell you their furs stunk. There was a 
man called Billy Fish, a good friend of us all, and 
they cut his throat, Sir, then and there, like a pig; 
and the King kicks up the bloody snow and says: — 
* We’ve had a dashed fine run for our money. 
What’s coming next? ’ But Peachey, Peachey 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. *41 

Taliaferro, I tell you, Sir, in confidence as betwixt 
two friends, he lost his head, Sir. No, he didn’t 
neither. The King lost his head, so he did, all 
along o’ one of those cunning rope-bridges. 
Kindly let me have the paper-cutter, Sir. It tilted 
this way. They marched him a mile across that 
snow to a rope-bridge over a ravine with a river at 
the bottom. You may have seen such. They 

prodded him behind like an ox. * D your 

eyes !’ says the King. ‘ D’you suppose I can’t die 
like a gentleman? ’ He turns to Peachey — Peachey 
that was crying like a child. ‘ I’ve brought you to 
this, Peachey,’ says he. 1 Brought you out of your 
happy life to be killed in Kafiristan, where you was 
late Commander-in-Chief of the Emperor’s forces. 
Say you forgive me, Peachey.’ ‘ I do,’ says 
Peachey. ‘Fully and freely do I forgive you, Dan.’ 
‘ Shake hands, Peachey,’ says he. ‘ I’m going 
now.’ Out he goes, looking neither right nor left, 
and when he was plumb in the middle of those 
dizzy dancing ropes, ‘ Cut, you beggars,’ he shouts; 
and they cut, and old Dan fell, turning round and 
round and round, twenty thousand miles, for he 
took half an hour to fall till he struck the water, 
and I could see his body caught on a rock with the 
gold crown close beside. 

“ But do you know what they did to Peachey be- 
tween two pine trees? They crucified him, Sir, as 
Peachey’s hand will show. They used wooden 
pegs for his hands and his feet; and he didn’t die. 
He hung there and screamed, and they took him 


14 * the man who would be king. 

down next day, and said it was a miracle that fie 
wasn’t dead. They took him down — poor old 
Peachey that hadn’t done them any harm — that 
hadn’t done them any. . .” 

He rocked to and fro and wept bitterly, wiping 
his eyes with the back of his scarred hands and 
moaning like a child for some ten minutes. 

“ They was cruel enough to feed him up in the 
temple, because they said he was more of a God 
than old Daniel that was a man. Then they turned 
him out on the snow, and told him to go home, 
and Peachey came home in about a year, begging 
along the roads quite safe; for Daniel Dravot he 
walked before and said : — ■ Come along, Peachey. 
It’s a big thing we’re doing.’ The mountains they 
danced at night, and the mountains they tried to 
fall on Peachey’s head, but Dan he held up his hand, 
and Peachey came along, bent double. He never 
let go of Dan’s hand, and he never let go of Dan’s 
head. They gave it to him as a present in the 
temple, to remind him not to come again, and 
though the crown was pure gold, and Peachey was 
starving, never would Peachey sell the same. You 
knew Right Worshipful Brother Dravot! Look 
at him now! ” 

He fumbled in the mass of rags round his bent 
waist; brought out a black horsehair bag embroi- 
dered with silver thread; and shook therefrom on 
to my table — the dried, withered head of Daniel 
Dravot! The morning sun that had long been pal- 
ing the lamps struck the red beard and blind 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KINO. 143 

iunken eyes; struck, too, a heavy circlet of gold 
Studded with raw turquoises, that Carnehan placed 
tenderly on the battered temples. 

“ You behold now,” said Carnehan, “ the Empe- 
ror in his habit as he lived — the King of Kafiristan 
with his crown upon his head. Poor old Daniel 
that was a monarch once! ” 

I shuddered, for, in spite of defacements mani- 
fold, I recognized the head of the man of Marwar 
Junction. Carnehan rose to go. I attempted to 
stop him. He was not fit to walk abroad. “ Let 
me take away the whisky, and give me a little 
money,” he gasped. “ I was a King once. I’ll go 
to the Deputy Commissioner and ask to set in the 
Poorhouse till I get my health. No, thank you, I 
can’t wait till you get a carriage for me. I’ve 
urgent private affairs — in the south — at Marwar.” 

He shambled out of the office and departed in 
the direction of the Deputy Commissioner’s house. 
That day at noon I had occasion to go down the 
blinding hot Mall, and I saw a crooked man crawl- 
ing along the white dust of the roadside, his hat in 
his hand, quavering dolorously after the fashion of 
street-singers at Home. There was not a soul in 
sight, and he was out of all possible earshot of the 
houses. And he sang through his nose, turning 
his head from right to left: 

“ The Son of Man goes forth to war, 

A golden crown to gain ; 

His blood-red banner streams afaJ W( — 

Wfeo follows in his train ? ” 




*44 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. 


I waited to hear no more, but put the pom- 
wretch into my carriage and drove him off to the 
nearest missionary for eventual transfer to the Asy- 
lum. He repeated the hymn twice while he was 
with me whom he did not in the least recognize, 
and I left him singing it to the missionary. 

Two days later I inquired after his welfare of the 
Superintendent of the Asylum. 

“ He was admitted suffering from sunstroke. 
He died early yesterday morning,” said the Super- 
intendent. “Is it true that he was half an hour 
bareheaded in the sun at midday? ” 

“ Yes,” said I, “ but do you happen to know if 
he had anything upon him by any chance when he 
died?” 

“ Not to my knowledge,” said the Superintend 


dent. 

And there the matter rests. 


THE Btt&c 






















LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 






